


The Memory Box

by DocMarten2525



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Detective Noir, F/M, Post-Canon, reminiscences, some canon divergence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-01-29 22:57:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 34,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12641016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DocMarten2525/pseuds/DocMarten2525
Summary: The Commonwealth has changed in the years since the Institute fell and a mostly-retired Nick Valentine is finding it difficult to cope with the passing of the years. But when dark forces threaten the Commonwealth - and Nick's adopted family - he must reluctantly strap on his shoulder holster and travel past the frontier to confront them - and his own forgotten past.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Author’s Note: This story takes place after the events recounted in “A Beautiful Heart” and the game itself, Fallout 4, but before “Ghosts”. While it will stand alone, it builds on the relationship between Ellie and Nick developed in ABH and contains some references to events from that story.
> 
> Geographically, events occur in the US states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, beyond the borders of the Fallout 4 map. As a result, I’ve had to rearrange the Fallout map somewhat, incorporating real-life geographical details and place names. And poof! Away goes that odd mountain range on the Commonwealth’s northern border… Sorry, canon. You too, Nikon.]
> 
> SPOILER WARNING: The story "Ghosts" contains spoilers to this story.

Some days, Nick felt older than others.

The winter had been long and cold, and even wetter than usual for Boston, with storms gusting in off the ocean, heavy with snow and rain. The cold thickened the lubricating fluid in Nick’s knee joints, and the constant damp messed with his capacitors, translating as a stiffness and a dull ache that made movement slow and painful. He’d been down to the market to see Antonio about it this morning. A shot of gun oil in his joints usually helped him get past the worst of it. But the bearings themselves were starting to break down. With the Institute a distant memory, spare parts for aging synths were nowadays nearly impossible to find.

Nick missed Antonio’s father, who’d been a genius with a lathe and a soldering iron. But Arturo was gone, carried off like so many others when the Great ‘Flu of ’98 came roaring down the eastern seaboard. Hard to believe that had been almost 30 years ago, or that little Antonio now had adult children of his own.

At least the weather had finally turned. The last couple days had been warm and spring-like. He doubted it would hold, but it was nice while it lasted.

Nick turned his attention back to the typewriter in front of him, squinting as the letters on the page blurred in and out. The motors behind his eyes whirred back and forth, hunting unsuccessfully for focus. Finally he sighed and reached for his reading glasses. Adjusting them on his nose, he read over what he had written. He grimaced, then back-spaced over several lines of type and x’ed them out. He tried again, laboriously pecking at the keyboard with two fingers.

_“Would he have killed us?”_ he wrote, _“If we’d stood our ground and dared him to do his worst? I don’t know. Hancock always seemed to me like a decent guy, for a ghoul. But among the criminal class you are either predator or prey, and once the word gets out you’re prey, the predators start lining up. It was pretty clear Bobbi No Nose had her own reasons for organizing that raid on Hancock’s warehouse, ones she never got around to sharing with the rest of us until it was too late. So when he gave us the choice of walk away or die, we walked. I’m not proud of myself for leaving Bobbi behind. But self-preservation is a powerful motivator.”_

Nick leaned back in his chair. “Ellie, can you get me the Hancock file?” He twisted his head around to look at her desk. It was empty, of course. He shook his head at himself. It had been years since Ellie last sat there. Nowadays it was her youngest grand-daughter, Lily, who came in for a couple hours every day after school. Or at least, that was the arrangement. There always seemed to be something getting in the way, and even when she was there her heart wasn’t really in it. Plus she couldn’t type worth a damn. Of course, she was young yet, and he was remarkably fond of her. But he missed Ellie.

Nick looked back at his memoir and added: _“Besides, she treated her girls like slaves. Wore them out, used them up, and threw them away. So whatever happened to her, probably it was what she deserved. And good riddance.”_

He ripped the page out of the typewriter and added it to the pile on the desk. Probably he’d have to re-write that last sentence, even if it was the truth. He growled, remembering Ellie’s mother trying to barter her ten-year-old daughter for a fix. On second thought, maybe he’d leave it in there. Besides, who was going to see this besides him? And Ellie, of course. He’d been reading bits of it to her when he went up to visit.

Mostly it was a way to pass the time. Things were a lot slower in the private detective biz than they’d once been. Nick blamed Danny Sullivan for that, for cleaning up Diamond City Security and turning it into a real police force instead of a gang of armed thugs. Hell, they even had their own detectives now – Nick had trained most of them – and there was a system of courts and judges to weed the innocent from the guilty. Danny was long gone, but the current Chief was almost as good. Competence gets to be a habit, after a while.

The Commonwealth itself was a changed place. There had been a day when people’s lives here played out against the rattle of distant gunfire, like background music coming from a radio. But peace had come, finally. A person could walk from Sanctuary Hills all the way down to Quincy and never see anything more threatening than a farm dog barking from the other side of a fence.

It had been a long time coming.

A thought interrupted Nick’s reverie and he fed another sheet into the typewriter.

_“Funny, how much the violence subsided when the Institute fell. It makes you wonder if the unrelenting chaos of those days wasn’t deliberately engineered. It wouldn’t take much – a nudge here or a poke there – to keep the fires of anarchy burning. And the Institute had agents everywhere, including nearly all the traders, albeit unwittingly so, mostly._

_So much of it was fed by easy access to weapons. Where did they all come from? And the endless supply of ammunition for them? And all those explosives? “Salvage” they’ll tell you – army stockpiles, supplies from abandoned Vaults and the leftovers from a society so heavily-armed that school children kept hand grenades in their lockers. But after so many years? Not likely. Nor could even the best of the Commonwealth’s craftsmen have ever turned out one perfectly-machined automatic rifle after another, exactly sized to fit standard shells. That kind of mass-produced manufacturing takes machinery and facilities. And money. We’ll never know now for sure who was responsible. When the Institute blew, all its records went with it. But after it was gone, things were different. There is a reason why we celebrate Independence Day not on July 4, the birthday of the old United States of America, but on April 17, the day the Institute was destroyed._

He missed it some days, in the way of old men in every era who come to look back on their younger, wilder selves with a mixture of nostalgia and relief. But where once the days blazed with fire, now they simply drifted by, leaving nothing behind to mark their passing. Maybe that was why he stuck so doggedly to his typewriter: because it gave solid form to the events of those days and the people who made them happen. Gone now, mostly, living only in his memory. And now, on these pages.

Besides, it wasn’t like he didn’t have a lot of time. Hell, he’d even started taking divorce cases.

Nick stared at the page, drumming his fingers on the desk. It was well past suppertime by now. He had to get out. Anything had to be better than sitting around here. He climbed stiffly to his feet and jammed his hat on his head. As an afterthought he took his .45 out of the drawer and checked the load, then slipped it into his shoulder holster. Not much chance a gunfight was going to break out, but a guy could hope.

“I’m going out,” he said to the empty desk as he went by.

 

-OOO-

 

It was Friday night, and the Dugout was busy. He’d thought about heading up to the Colonial instead where it’d be less rowdy. But the Dugout was livelier and he’d had enough quiet contemplation for one day. The band was just finishing off a set when he walked in, and there was laughter coming from a big group by the bar. Lily was there, on the arm of a tall, young man, a few years older than her, with smiling eyes and teeth that gleamed in a confident smile. She was leaning back against him and smiling up into his face, and he had his arm around her waist, his hand sliding up underneath the front of her shirt.  She had a cowboy hat on -- it must have been his – and she was laughing as she slapped at his hand. It moved, but not very far, and he only grinned more widely. His friends were egging him on, and everyone seemed in grand spirits. There were a couple boys in the group Nick recognized, but the others were strangers. He frowned a little and caught her eye, shooting her a look of disapproval. She looked at him briefly then looked away.

“Nick, my friend!” a huge voice roared from across the room as he worked his way toward the bar. “You’re just in time to help me settle some of these ruffians down.” Boris Bobrov grinned at him, planting his hamlike fists on the bar top. He was a big, heavily-muscled man in his late 40s, standing well over six feet, with black hair and a thick black beard, now heavily streaked with grey.

Nick laughed as he approached. “I can’t imagine you needing my help,” he said. Someone obligingly vacated a stool for him and he sat down on it, nodding his thanks and wincing slightly at a sudden stiffness in his hips. “How about I watch the bar while you settle the ruffians?”

“Probably that is best,” Bobrov answered. “I only said that because you are my favourite uncle and I want to make you feel welcome.”

“You can make me feel welcome by pouring me a whiskey and leaving the bottle,” Nick said. “And I’m not your uncle. Unless you’ve got some mechanical parts you never told anyone about.”

“Ha! That’s good. But Mama, she loved you, and so to me, you will always be my Uncle Nick. You know, the strange one we don’t talk about very much! But we love him all the same.”

“Well, it’s good to be loved.” Nick accepted the bottle and a glass. He pushed a handful of caps across the bar and shook a pair of cigarettes out of his pack, passed one to Boris and lit up himself, the smoke coiling upward to join the haze already filling the room.

Boris stayed a few minutes, smoking and making idle conversation before excusing himself to go look after customers. Nick drained his glass and re-filled it. Mostly he drank for appearances. Alcohol didn’t normally hit him the way did humans. His converters ate it up like they did any other organic, turning it into fuel for the tiny fusion furnace in his gut. Which was too bad. There had been many times over the years he’d wished he could have gone on a bender. Lately, though, he found himself feeling a bit lightheaded after a few drinks. Some kind of imbalance in his main power delivery systems, he guessed. He could head down to Antonio’s and get it adjusted, which might help. Or he could leave it alone. It made drinking a lot more fun.

He sat quietly, drinking steadily and feeling himself drift away. The noise ebbed and flowed: music and laughter, voices raised in drunken conversation, all fading into the background. Memories unwound around him. An afternoon on someone’s sailboat, sunlight reflecting off the water, a pretty girl leaning her head on his shoulder in that long-vanished time before the War. Ellie, squealing with delight at a brand new, still-in-plastic, crossword puzzle book. Her favourite obsession. A lucky find, he said, rather than telling her how much he’d paid the collector for it. The Bobrovs – Vadim and Yefim, Boris’ uncles – the look on their faces the day he’d walked in with their long-lost sister and her young son in tow. Ellie, learning to read, trying hard to catch up to the children her own age. Ellie, barely in her teens, getting ready for a date, half in tears because her hair wouldn’t stay flat. And then, taking her arm to walk her down the aisle to where her fiancé waited and wondering how the half-wild waif he’d once rescued had become the tall, graceful woman beside him.

“Hi, Boss!” a voice in his ear interrupted his reverie. Lily draped herself over his shoulder. Her eyes were bright and her face was flushed, and she seemed to be having a slight problem with her consonants.

“Hi, Lily,” he answered, patting her hand. “Missed you at the office today.”

“I know,” she said straightening up a little unsteadily. “I’m sorry, Uncle Nick. I was all caught up and there just didn’t seem like much to do.”

“Gee, sorry about that. I’ll see if I can find more work for you next time.”

“Maybe if you got out once in a while, had a few adventures, I’d have some filing to keep me busy. Plus, then I wouldn’t have to listen to you swear at the typewriter all the time.” She’d lost the cowboy hat from before, so now she snatched Nick’s battered fedora off and perched it on her own head, tilting the brim down and grinning at him from underneath it. He cracked a smile in spite of his mood. Ellie’s grand-daughters had all gotten blonde hair from somewhere, but Lily was the only one with her grandmother’s eyes.

He retrieved his hat and set it back on his head. “I’m too old for adventures,” he said. “Just putting up with you kids is adventure enough for me. Besides, it’s harder to find adventures in the Commonwealth these days. Things are a lot quieter now.”

Lily made a face. “A lot more boring, you mean. Did you see the paper? There’s a new show opening at the Pickman Gallery this week, and – brace yourself, Uncle – people are worried it will conflict with the premiere of ‘My Fair Lady’ at the Combat Zone. Oh. My. God. I can’t stand the excitement.”

 Nick grunted. “Happens I did see that. So what? It’s a sign of prosperity. Means people aren’t scrabbling just to survive anymore.”

She rolled her eyes. “But Pickman? Didn’t he dissect people while they were still alive then use their blood for his paintings? And didn’t they fight to the death at the Combat Zone?”

“Yes, he did and they did. Raiders, mostly, which to be honest I never could get too upset about. Good riddance to the bunch of them. Pickman included.” Nick took another drink and lit a cigarette.

Lily stomped her foot. “Oh, God, Uncle Nick, will you listen to yourself? How can you stand it? Back in the day, there were real problems. Feral ghouls everywhere, and raiders, and evil robots – sorry, Uncle, you know what I mean – and the Institute always waiting to pounce. It’s like the world was teetering on the thin edge of disaster all the time. People like you and Grandma really made a difference in the world. Now, the biggest thing we have to worry about is if the bus to Quincy is on time.”

“Good,” Nick said morosely. “The fact you can say that means we really did make a difference. You should be thanking me instead of complaining about it.”

“I do. Really I do. It’s just that…” she gestured helplessly. “Everything is so civilized, now. Boring. I wish it was the way it used to be.”

“Boring?” Something inside Nick snapped and he slapped his hand down angrily on the bar, knocking his half-empty bottle over. Whiskey slopped out onto the countertop. “Boring?” he repeated. His voice rose and he could feel his fight-or-flight systems begin to kick in. The world around him slowed down a little. “You’re damned right it’s boring. Boring enough that you can spend your nights hanging out here getting drunk with your pretty-boy friends instead of scavenging in the ruins for your next meal. And I’ll tell you something else, Lily. Too many good people died making it that way for you to stand there and complain about it. If you really want excitement, there’s lots left in the world. All you have to do is go look for it. Me, I’m going to sit right here and enjoy all the boredom. I’ve earned it.”

Lily’s eyes blazed and her cheeks burned bright red. “So you spend your days cooped up in that stupid office typing your stupid memoirs no one’s ever going to read.” She sneered, stung by his angry words. “The great Nick Valentine.”

Nick lurched to his feet, his eyes blazing. “How dare you?”

She took a step back, a look of horror in her eyes at the realization of what she’d said. “Uncle, I –”

“What’s going on here?” a new voice demanded. “Is this guy bothering you, Lil?” Lily’s companion from earlier forced his way between them. He was tall, wide across the shoulders with long hair gathered into a pony-tail at the back and the beginnings of a downy beard spreading across his cheeks and chin. His arm badge identified him as a Minuteman, one of that quasi-military group tasked with protecting the outlying farming communities in the Commonwealth.

“No, Garrick, I…”

“Mind your own business, son,” Nick said brusquely, beginning to turn back to the bar.

The Minuteman growled, jabbing a finger at his arm badge. “You see this patch, old man? This patch says I’ll mind whatever business I decide to mind.” He grabbed Nick by the shoulder and spun him around. His jaw dropped as he got a good look at Nick for the first time.

“What the… what the hell?” he stuttered, stepping back. “What the hell are you?”

“Garrick, don’t be stupid.” Lily said, her eyes wide.

He shook her off. “It’s a … a robot. A _synth_. A fucking synth. All dressed up in clothes pretending to be human. Who do you think you are, coming in here, talking sass to your betters?” He grabbed Nick by the front of his coat with one hand, hauling him off his feet while fumbling at the holster on his hip for the automatic that rode there. “I’ll show you what we do to things like you around here.”

Lily screamed, a high, piercing shriek that cut through the hubbub in the bar. In one lightning move Nick brought his hand up – the metal hand, the one with all the skin stripped off – breaking the Minuteman’s grip and wrenching his head back by the ponytail while drawing the revolver from inside his coat with the other. The man’s jaw dropped open and Nick jammed the barrel up hard against the roof of his mouth and thumbed back the hammer.

Garrick froze. Then swallowed, carefully. Nick glowered. The bar was silent.

“Hey now… hey!” There was the sound of the bar hatch slamming open, and Boris Bobrov’s booming voice. “What the hell? I go into the back for two minutes and there’s a gunfight? Get out of my way, you.” There was a noise like a scuffle, and then a thud and the sound of a body slumping to the floor. Boris’ voice continued. “The rest of you put your guns away unless you want to go for a nap like your friend.”

Nick spared a glance across the room to where Bobrov stood scowling at the small group of young Minutemen – recruits, Nick now realized – in the far corner. “I talk to your sergeant,” the bartender was saying, “you’ll spend your enlistment slopping out pig barns. And you, Howie Garcia… Drunk and stupid I expect from out-of-town hicks like these, but you’re from around here. You want I should tell your mother? You’re not so big she won’t paddle your behind for you.”

He stumped across the room, a short, weighted club in one hand. “Nick Valentine, I would appreciate you didn’t kill him. He still has caps in his pocket he hasn’t spent yet. Also I just washed the floor right where you’re standing from the last guy got killed in here.”

“A little lesson in manners is all,” Nick said.

“Just make sure it doesn’t involve getting blood on my floor.”

The Minuteman rolled his eyes in Boris’ direction, then back to Nick.

The detective smiled dourly up at him. “Look, kid,” he said, “I can see you’re young. You ever want to get old, there’s a couple of things you should know. First off, don’t fight unless you have to. Fighting is the last answer, not the first one. Second, next time you want to impress a girl, try flowers. Finally, I ever see you groping my favourite niece again, I’ll rip your arm off and make you eat it. She’s sixteen. She doesn’t need lowlifes like you trying to get into her pants.”

Nick drew the man’s sidearm and tossed it to Boris, who emptied the magazine and gave it back. He released him then uncocked his revolver and holstered it before handing back the automatic. “Nice piece,” he added. “Needs oiling. You want to stay alive on the frontier, take better care of your gear. Now beat it.” He pushed him away.

Garrick beat it, along with his friends carrying their unconscious comrade between them. There were some dirty looks thrown, but no other trouble. After they left, Lily came up to him. “Uncle Nick, I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “I didn’t mean any of it the way it sounded. Please don’t be mad at me.”

Nick laughed. “You are your mother’s daughter,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, too. I’m not sure where that came from. Guess I’m getting grumpy in my old age.”

“You’re not old!”

“Yes, I am.” He sighed. “Maybe it’s my fault, telling you kids all those stories when you were little. The truth is, the world back then was a hard, dirty place. We paid a high price, all of us, trying to clean it up a little, maybe make it safe for you to grow up in.” He looked over his shoulder at the puddle of whiskey on the bar. “And now look what I’ve done. Perfectly good whiskey, wasted.”

“Well, I’m sorry, anyway. And for how he acted, the big jerk. As if I couldn’t take care of myself.” She looked sharply at Nick as if about to say more. Then her expression brightened. “Am I really your favourite?”

“Sure,” he nodded. “If I had a favourite. Now get on home. Say ‘hi’ to your mother for me. And tell your grandmother I’m going to come see her again tomorrow. How’s she feeling, by the way?”

“I meant to tell you! She was up yesterday for a little while, and today she ate a real breakfast. We sat outside in the courtyard and she was talking about getting the garden in and having Dad put up some new flowerpots. Just like her old self. Maybe she’s turned a corner. I hope so. I miss my Nan the way she used to be.”

“That’s great news,” Nick said. “I’ll come by tomorrow morning sometime, after she gets up. Make sure you tell her. Now, look – you better get moving. Your mother finds you in here, we’ll both be in trouble.”

“Oh, Uncle. I’m not a child, you know. But I’ll go anyway. Not because you told me to! I just want to see how Grandma’s doing.” She grinned impishly at him and leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, then skipped out, waving to Boris as she went by.

Howie Garcia had stayed behind when the other recruits left, and now he came over. He had his Minuteman armband off and was twisting it in his hands. “I’m sorry, Mr. Valentine,” he said, his eyes downcast. “I didn’t mean for that to happen, before. Garrick’s okay. He just likes to show off.”

Nick grunted. “Well, either the Minutemen will beat it out of him or someone else will. I saw the recruiters set up in the market this morning,” he added. “Does your mother know you signed up?”

The boy looked even more miserable. “No, I haven’t told her yet. I’m afraid of what she’ll say. It’s not set in stone, anyway. We march north tomorrow, but Sarge said anyone who doesn’t show up doesn’t go, that’s all. I just thought it would be pretty cool, defending the Commonwealth and all. But after what happened here, maybe they’re not my kind of people.”

Nick smiled. “Oh, those boys’ll all shake out just fine. You’ll see. Even your pal, Garrick. The Minutemen are a good outfit. They need smart guys like you on the frontier, keeping the rest of us safe. Just make sure to keep your head down and your ears open.”

“I will.”

“Good. You might want to head home, though, and tell your mother. And keep an eye out for Lily on your way, too, if you don’t mind.”

Nick stayed, drinking whiskey while the bar cleared out. Finally, it was just him. Boris brought out another bottle and a clean glass and sat down beside him. They smoked together for a while and finally Nick said:

“She’s right, you know. The Commonwealth _is_ boring, compared to what it used to be. It feels like a spark has gone out of the world.”

“Good. Safer that way. Better for business.”

Nick laughed. “Boris, I feel old. I feel creaky. Most days I feel useless, too. Like the world has passed me by. So I spend my days sitting in the office writing up all my old case files and slowly going to pot.” He finished his glass and poured another drink for both of them.

Boris drank. “Nick, I have known you since before I can remember. In all that time, you have always been old and creaky. But never useless. I could name a hundred people in Diamond City alone who are in your debt, me included. Without you, Mama and I would never have escaped the bad place, would never have come here. Mama lived a long, happy life, surrounded by people who loved her. All because of you. That’s why I always give you the good whiskey when you come in.”

“Very kind of you to say.” Nick lit up another cigarette and passed one to Boris. “Still, it would be nice to go out with a bang.”

“You talk as if you’re going to die,” Boris said. “Probably you’ll outlive me.”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Nick said. “Maybe I’ve outlived too many people already.”

 

-OOO-

 

Nick was at his desk again the next morning. He was going through his stack of cold cases. Some of them went back nearly fifty years. Kidnappings and murders, mostly. Unsolvable now, for the most part. He pulled out a folder at random. “The Mechanist Murders”, it said in Ellie’s neat script. A series of seemingly disconnected, gangland-style slayings apparently perpetrated by robots. But Nick had been able to prove the victims were all connected to the jet trade, and he figured someone – Donny Marowski was his guess, but he’d never been able to prove it – was whittling down the competition. Didn’t matter now, anyway. Marowski was long gone and his organization with him, along with most of the other mafia-style Triggermen gangs. And good riddance to them, too.

He shoved the folder back into the drawer and closed it. The sun was out this morning and the day was warming up a little. His knees felt a little looser today. Might be a good day to get out of DC, go for a walk and relive a few old memories. Hell, he could even take in the show at the Pickman. Might help fill in some details for his memoirs, too. At the very least, he wouldn’t have to spend the day fighting with his typewriter.

Just then the door banged open. It was Lily. She was crying.

Nick started out of his chair. “What on earth, child?”

“Uncle Nick, you have to come. It’s Grandma. She won’t wake up.”

Nick swore and grabbed his hat. Outside, the narrow, crooked streets were full of people enjoying the spring sunshine. He took Lily’s hand and pushed his way through the crowds, his haste making him rude.

“Did you call Doc Tandy?” he called over his shoulder. She nodded, blinking back tears. “Good.” He led them around a slow moving farm cart, piled high with produce. “I thought you said she was feeling better.”

“She was!”

They crossed a small plaza where a flower vendor was hawking her wares and started up a wide staircase. Ellie lived with her daughter’s family in a house overlooking what would have once been left field, back when Diamond City was Fenway Park, the home of baseball in the city of Boston, Massachusetts. Not so long ago, this area had been gardens and greenhouses. But it was all built up now, and new staircases snaked their way up the stands into new neighbourhoods. Nowadays, the city imported the food needed to support its growing population.

Tandy was already in with Ellie by the time Nick arrived. The family was gathered around the front room, waiting.

“Nick, I’m so glad you’re here.” Ellie’s daughter, Annie, greeted him, standing up to put her arms around him. He hugged her, feeling the wetness on her cheeks. She was in her early 40s and dark-haired, like her mother. Jack, her husband, sat on the couch with Lily’s older sisters, Harper and Jeannie.

“What’s going on?” Nick said, letting Annie go and nodding toward the closed bedroom door. “Lily said she was feeling better?”

Annie sniffed back tears. “She was. I was so worried about her after this winter, but then the sun finally came out and she just perked right up. We had a wonderful day. Nick, I should have called you. I said we should, and she said no, we’d come over to the office today. And then -- ” her voice caught, “then I went in this morning and she wouldn’t wake up.”

Nick sat with them on the couch, listening to them talk. Ellie had been sick most of the winter. Cancer, of course. Ubiquitous, nearly inevitable, if you lived long enough. Too much radiation – in the soil, in the water, in the air, even. There were treatments – she’d had both breasts removed a few years before – but they didn’t do much more than delay the inevitable. Funny, Nick thought. The doctors could re-attach a limb, re-grow tissue, fix a bullet hole, but they were helpless when the body’s cells suddenly began growing out of control.

He tried to remember how old Ellie was. Almost 70, he thought. A very respectable age in the Commonwealth. It didn’t make it any easier.

Tandy came out, looking sombre. He was a young man, with thinning, sandy-coloured hair and grey eyes. A wash of freckles sprayed across his nose, adding to his youthful appearance. He nodded at Nick. “She’s awake,” he said. “I gave her a shot to bring her out of it. She wants to talk to you all.”

The family filed into her room, Annie holding tightly to Jack’s hand. Tandy motioned to Nick to stay behind.

“What’s going on, Doc?”

The doctor shook his head. “It’s not good, Nick. Her body’s starting to shut down. The cancer’s back, and it’s worse than ever. It’s everywhere. And the pain is… very bad. She has a few days now, at the most. Maybe less.”

“I thought she’d had some kind of remission? The way they were talking, she was up and around the last little while...” Nick stopped, then closed his eyes. “She used stimpacks on herself,” he said, realizing. “Must’ve had some squirreled away, just waiting for the weather to break. Probably only needed a couple, just enough to give her some energy.”

Tandy nodded. “That’s my guess.”

Nick laughed without humour. “Not a bad exchange, really. Traded her last few weeks of lying in bed for a day with her family. I’d do the same, come to think of it.”

The girls were crying in each other’s arms when they came out of the room. Annie was holding on to Jack. He had the look of a man trying hard to be strong for the sake of others and only partly succeeding.

“Nick,” he said. “She’s asking for you.”

 

-OOO-

 

Ellie lay on the bed, propped up on the pillows with the covers pulled up closely around her, as if by wrapping her tight they could keep the life inside from escaping. She was thin and frail, her skin like paper, almost translucent in the sunlight that streamed into the room. Her eyes were closed, and a halo of white hair surrounded her face against the pillow.

The walls were covered in photographs, carefully framed and mounted. Ellie sitting at her desk at the detective agency, frowning in concentration as she worked at a crossword puzzle. Her and Eddie on their wedding day. The two of them at the seashore somewhere, baby Annie lying on the blanket between them. Nick doing his best Humphrey Bogart, leaning against a wall with his collar turned up and the brim of his hat down low. Annie as a toddler, sitting on Nick’s knee and looking gravely up at him. All three of the grandchildren dressed in costumes for a school play. Keepsakes and knickknacks lined the shelves, mementoes of years gone by all neatly arranged. Her little .38 was even there, the one Nick had given her so many years ago, on a stand on the dresser. It had been cleaned recently and gleamed with fresh oil, and there was a box of shells beside it.

She opened her eyes as he sat down in the chair beside the bed. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

“Came as soon as I heard. How is it?”

“Bad.” She coughed weakly. “Nick, I’m not getting through this one.”

“Ellie, don’t talk nonsense.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “We knew this day would come. Happens to everyone, sooner or later.”

Nick shook his head stiffly. “No, don’t talk that way. You know I can’t manage the office by myself. I’ve just been mooching around this last little while, waiting for you to get back to work so we can get those damned memoirs finished.”

“Lily will help you with them.”

“Huh. She’s a smart girl, but she can’t type worth a damn. Mostly interested in boys, at the moment. Reminds me of her grandmother a little bit that way.” He grinned at Ellie, then his face fell. “What am I going to do without you?” he said, his voice thick with misery.

Ellie laughed, then grimaced at the pain. “Carry on, I guess, like people always do.” She touched his hand. “Nick…There’s something I need.”

“Of course. Anything.”

She motioned toward the drawer in the little bedside table. He opened it. There was a syringe inside.

He looked at her and shook his head. “Ellie, I can’t. ”

“I had Doc Tandy bring it,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Some time ago. Such a nice young man. I think he’s rather fond of Jeannie. It would be nice to have a doctor in the family.” She trailed off. Nick waited. After a while, she said: “Nick, I meant to come see you yesterday. But we were having such a wonderful time, and I thought I’d have one more day and that I would be able to come down to the office and spend all of it just with you. But it turns out I didn’t have one more day. I’m sorry.” She turned her head painfully toward him. “It hurts everywhere, Nick. And it’s going to get worse. Just this one last thing I need you to do for me. I won’t ask you for anything again after that, I promise.” She laughed at her own joke, but the laugh turned into a cough that left her curled in agony, a thin thread of saliva hanging from the corner of her mouth. “Please, Nick,” she finally whispered.

He picked up the syringe. “Annie, and the children?”

“We’ve said our good-byes. They’ll be fine. Jack’s a good man, and they have you to look after them, too. So now there’s no good-byes left to say. Except you and me.”

“I’ll miss you, Ellie.”

“I won’t go far. The wind in the leaves. The sunlight on your face… that will be me. Just close your eyes and I’ll be there. I promise.”

Nick turned back the covers and smoothed the skin on the inside of her elbow, looking for a vein. He found it, uncapped the syringe and squeezed out a bead of fluid from the tip. He looked at her. She nodded and closed her eyes. She winced a little as the needle slipped under the skin, then opened her eyes and looked steadily into his. He looked back at her, and their gazes locked as he pushed down on the plunger. When the syringe was empty, he eased it out and set it aside. He took her hand in his and waited.

“He loved me,” she said suddenly. “Eddie loved me with all his heart. I was lucky to have him.” She was breathing slow and shallow, the air whistling in and out of her lungs. Nick could feel the pulse slowing in her wrist. Her eyelids started to droop. Then they opened again, one last time. “But he wasn’t you.”

Nick sat still for a very long time. Once, someone looked into the room, then retreated. Somewhere, a clock ticked. Finally, he reached out and closed her eyes then folded the blanket up over her face.

 

-OOO-

**  
**


	2. Chapter 2

The Valentine Detective Agency re-opened a few days after the funeral. Lily eventually came back to work, but only here and there. Her heart wasn’t in it. Neither was Nick’s. Mostly he stayed at his desk. Sometimes he picked away at his memoirs, but it was hard to stay focussed. There had been a steady stream of visitors at first, leaving flowers and cards and other tokens. Ellie had been well-loved and for her sake Nick was polite. He appreciated that they were trying to be kind. But he wished they would go away, and after a while they did. After that, it was mostly just him, sitting in the semi-gloom staring at nothing.

One day a couple weeks later he received a different kind of visitor. He was at his typewriter, trying to force himself to take up where he’d left off. Lily was at her desk, studying.

“It’s open,” he called, hearing the knock. The door swung wide and a dark figure stood outlined in the light streaming in from outside: a man dressed in a long black trench coat, belted at the front. He was wearing dark glasses and a black fedora, with a silver scarf tied around his neck and tucked into his coat front, and he wore a Minuteman armband. His clothing was travel-stained and his face behind the dark glasses looked worn and tired.

Nick smiled, his first one in weeks. “Hello, Nate,” he said, getting up.

The stranger smiled. “Mind if I come in?” Without waiting for an answer he stepped through the door, undoing his coat and throwing it over the back of a chair, and balancing his hat and sunglasses precariously on top. The man revealed was of medium height and build, with close-cropped hair and a neatly trimmed beard, both mostly grey with touches of red, hinting at the hair colour of his youth. His face was old and scarred, his long years marked by the deep wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. But his eyes were blue and bright, and he had an easy smile.

The two men shook hands. “It’s good to see you, Nick,” Nate said.

“You, too.” Nick nodded at where Lily sat wide-eyed at her desk. “You remember Lily, of course. Annie’s youngest.  Lily, do you remember Nate? General Howard, I should say, of the Minutemen?”

Nate stepped forward, offering his hand. “How do you do?” he said, taking her hand. “I’m sure you wouldn’t, since you were quite young when we last met. But I remember you very well. You bit me at the time. Quite enthusiastically.”

Lily stood tongue-tied, blushing furiously, then shook his hand. “I’m sorry,” she finally blurted out. “I don’t remember. Mama says I bit a lot of people when I was little.  But I don’t anymore, really.”

“You can’t imagine how relieved I am to hear that.” Nate let go of her hand. “And I’m very sorry to hear about your grandmother.” He turned back to Nick. “You too,” he said. “I know it must have been hard on everyone. And I feel terrible about missing the funeral. My adjutant told me they sent an honour guard up from the Castle. But that’s not the same thing as me being there.”

“It’s okay.” Nick took a bottle and glasses out of his desk drawer. “I sent a message, but they said you were out of touch.” He poured drinks, holding one out.

“A long way out of touch,” Nate agreed, taking the glass. “Some stuff going on past the frontier. But I came as soon as I could.”

“Ellie would have understood.”

“I know. It’s just… you were there for me, when Piper --” He broke off, took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Nick. I really am. I know how hard this is. But believe me when I say it gets easier. It just takes time.”

“It’s okay. It wasn’t unexpected, although that doesn’t really change anything. And she’d made her peace with it.”

They raised their glasses. “To Ellie,” Nate said. Nick echoed the toast and they drank.

There was an awkward pause. Finally Nate laughed ruefully. “I’m sorry, Nick. I didn’t mean to make this about me.”

“Don’t worry about it. How long are you in town for? I’m going up to the house for supper tonight. Why don’t you come with me? Annie would love to see you. I’ll send Lily ahead to let her know you’re coming. Maybe we can head down to the Dugout after.”

Nate shook his head. “I can’t. I’m on my way to HQ for a big chin-wag, I’m afraid.” He jerked his head toward the door. “There’s an escort out in the street waiting for me. Probably making your neighbours wonder what’s going on. I’ll drop by and pay my respects, but I can’t stay more than a few minutes. I’m sorry, old friend. I know it’s been a while.”

Nick looked at him narrowly. “What’s going on, Nate? Can I help?”

“I don’t think so.” The General stood, thinking for a moment. “Maybe I’ll tell you about it anyway, if you’re sure you have the time. Gives me a chance to get the details straight, and maybe you’ll see something I’m missing. You mind if we sit down?” He looked around for a chair, pulled one up and sagged into it. “I’ve been sleeping on the ground the last few weeks. It’s not as fun as I remember.”

“I’ll bet. What were you looking for?”

The General hesitated, looking at Lily. “This is confidential stuff, Nick. It can’t leave this room.”

“It won’t. Lily’s rock solid.” He looked at her and she nodded. Nick poured two more glasses then pulled up another chair and sat down. “So what’s the deal?”

Nate took the drink and sipped at it. “For someone without tastebuds, Nick, you stock a nice whiskey. Truth is, I don’t know yet. If we’re lucky, it’s just slavers. If we’re not, maybe a full-scale invasion.”

“Go on.”

“We’ve been picking up rumours all winter. Lots of activity across the border, up New Hampshire way. We have spies out there, of course – that’s no secret – and the trade caravans cross regularly. We make it worth their while to be our eyes and ears. Since fall, we’ve been hearing disturbing news. Strangers. Murders and disappearances. Caravans looted, farmsteads wiped out.”

Nick shrugged. “Doesn’t sound like anything new,” he said. “Winter time always puts the pinch on the raider gangs.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s not just a few hungry marauders this time. There’s been attacks in force. And we’ve been getting refugees, enough that we’ve set up a camp for them at the old air force base at Hanscom. We’ve been disarming them as they come over, naturally. A few resisted. There’s some big warlords up that way. A couple of them tried to cross the border in force.”

“How did that go?”

“Badly, for them. But after we bloodied a few noses, they sued for peace. Lucky for us, they hate each other more than they hate us. I don’t like to think what would happen if they got together. That’s part of what this meeting is about tomorrow. Peace talks. Mutual defence. That’s sort of thing. Gets up my craw to make talk-talk with people who are barely one jump up from raiders themselves, but they know the country. And they’re fighting for their homes. I think we can trust them. For now.”

“We haven’t heard a word of this down here,” Nick said.

“Good. I don’t want the news to get out until we know what we’re facing.”

 “Sounds to me like someone’s moving in. Clearing the country and pushing people out ahead of them.”

“It does, doesn’t it? Still it can get pretty wild up there. But this is worse. We’ve been patrolling in force since the snow melted, and I’ve got rangers out scouting. Nick… the stuff that’s going on. Wait a minute.” He got up and went to the door, then came back with a young woman in uniform. She was a few years older than Lily: slightly built, with dark hair cut short almost to her skull. A long scar seamed one side of her face from forehead to jawline, and where her left eye had been was simply a mass of twisted scar tissue. She carried a long knife on one hip and a sniper rifle slung over her shoulder.

“Sir?” she said, eyeing Nick and Lily warily as if they might suddenly become threats to be dealt with.

“Winnie, this is Nick Valentine and his secretary, Lily. You may speak freely before them. Nick, Lily – this is Winnie -- Corporal Nguyen -- ” he used the anglicised pronunciation, ‘win’ --  “one my rangers. One of my best rangers, actually, and why she keeps refusing promotion I’ll never know.”

The corporal nodded at Nick. “It is an honour to meet you, Mr. Valentine. I have heard of you.”

Nick looked vaguely embarrassed. “Er… thanks. It’s an honour to meet you, too.”

“Winnie, tell them about Sawyer’s Crossing.”

“Yes sir. Three weeks ago I and two others – Privates Eckert and Millar -- were scouting about two days march northwest of Fort Carlisle, up toward the Green Mountains along the  old Turnpike Road trail. We were on the trail of a group of riders – 20-25, I estimate, with outriders and scouts, heading west. Just past the ruins at Jaffrey Station their trail merged with several other groups of similar sizes coming in from the north and south. I estimate close to 200 in total. It looked like some of them might have actually been camping there, waiting.

“By then we were no more than three days behind them. There was heavy smoke on the horizon, so we climbed Mount Monadnock to get a better look. There is a settlement at Sawyer’s Crossing, straddling the Ashuelot River, and it was clearly on fire. I left Eckert on watch there while Millar and I worked our way around to come at it from the north.

“By the time we got there, the town was a smoking ruin and the attackers were gone. There were no survivors.”

She stopped and looked at the General. He nodded. “It’s okay,” he said gently.  “I know it’s difficult.”

She nodded, gulped. “The dead were all men and older boys, along with older women. They’d been… slaughtered. Lined up and killed. And there were crucifixions. A dozen of them, nailed to telephone poles. Some of the women had been --” She closed her eyes. Finally she said:  “I’ve been on the frontier my whole life. I’ve been a ranger since I was 15. I thought I’d seen  it all. Apparently I was wrong.”

“Thank you, Corporal,” the General said, dismissing her. She saluted, nodded at Nick and Lily and left.

“Huh.” Nick’s eyes went hard. “What’s that bunch out west? Caesar’s Legion? They’d be a long way from home if it was.”

“That whole crucifixion thing sure sounds like them, doesn’t it? But Nevada and California are awfully far away. Maybe it’s a home-grown version. Damned little news coming out of the Great Lakes these days. Anything could be happening out there. The thing that really worries me is the size of it, and how well-organized it was. This wasn’t just a raid. Sawyer’s Crossing is an important trading centre. It’s heavily fortified, well-armed. They should have been able to hold for weeks, even against a determined assault.”

Nick’s eyes were hooded. “It sounds like a bad business, Nate,” he said. “I’m sorry about Sawyer’s Crossing, too. I used to know that area pretty well, once upon a time. Pretty little town, pre-War. Cheshire County. Used to be some good skiing up that way.” He paused. “Look, General … it’s been a while since I’ve been up that way, but if you needed another set of eyes on the ground, I could be convinced.”

“No, Nick. But thanks; I appreciate the offer. The Minutemen will handle it. And if we can’t, we’ll need every gun we have right here.” He looked back at Lily. “Can you shoot?”

She nodded. “Uncle Nick’s been teaching me,” she said.

“Good.”

-OOO-

 

After he left, Lily said, “Do you think anyone could really threaten us here? With all we’ve got?”

“I don’t know. Hearing the General talk that way makes me worried. He doesn’t go in for too much in the way of dramatics. Or he didn’t used to. It’s been a while since we talked. Maybe old age is finally catching up to him, too.”

“You were friends for a long time.”

“Uh huh.” Nick smiled at a sudden memory. “He came here looking for my help one day. Turns out I needed some rescuing of my own, first. After that, we travelled together for a piece. Pulled each other out of a few tight spots in the process.”

“Like when he helped you destroy the Institute.”

Nick laughed. “Who told you that? It was Nate who destroyed the Institute. I just tagged along.”

“That’s not how Grandma told it.”

“Well, she was fibbing a little, then. Oh, I did my bit, but it was Nate did most of the heavy lifting. And we had help – outfit called the Railroad supplied the muscle. It was a near thing all the same. In the end, we got lucky. Remember that. You can be tough as nails, smart as a fresh coat of paint and armed to the nuts, but it won’t matter a bent bottle cap if the luck runs against you.”

He frowned. “The Institute never took the threat seriously. Figured we’d fall apart at the first hard push. Even when we’d made it inside and the place was going up in flames around us. They never really believed they could lose.” He looked at the girl. “Remember that, too.”

 

-OOO-

 

It was two days later that Annie came bursting into Nick’s office. She was distraught, her face wild and her chest heaving. She had a note in her hand.

“Annie, what the hell?” Nick said, turning in his chair.

“Have you seen Lily?”

“What?”

“Lily! Have you seen Lily?”

He shook his head. “Not since Nate dropped by. Annie, calm down and tell me what’s going on.”

“She’s run away!”

“Run away? To where?”

Annie held out the note in her hand. Nick took it from her and read:

 

 _Dear Mom and Dad_ :

_I don’t want you to worry about me, even though I know you will. I wanted to tell you all this in person, but I knew you’d say ‘no’. So instead I’m doing it this way. Please don’t be sad. It’s something I have to do._

_Since Grandma died, all I’ve been able to think about is how soft my life is compared to hers, and how hard she had to fight to make the world a better place, just so I could grow up safe and happy. All of them – Grandma, and Uncle Nick and the General and everyone from those days. But instead of appreciating them, all I could think of was how boring my life is and how I wished I could go back to “the good old days”. I guess I know better than that – thank you, Uncle Nick, for reminding me. But it doesn’t mean I want to just sit here and wait for someone to stick a ring on my finger. Maybe that’s okay for Jeannie and Harper, but I feel like I owe it to Grandma to do something different with my life._

_When the General was talking to Uncle Nick he said there was trouble up on the frontier, that they’d need every hand they could get. So I’ve decided to join the Minutemen. I know I’m young, but we met a Ranger who enlisted when she was only fifteen. And they took Howie and he’s only just turned eighteen. Plus I can shoot a hundred times better than him. Uncle Nick’s been teaching me, and I can put three shots through a tin can before it hits the ground. He says that’s pretty good. Howie can hit the side of a barn two times out of three, if he’s standing close and it’s not moving too fast._

_I took Grandma’s gun. I’m sorry; I know that’s stealing. But I feel like she approves._

_Mom and Dad (and Uncle Nick) please don’t be mad at me. I have to do this._

_Love you,_

_Lily_

 

Nick finished reading and looked up to see Annie glaring at him. “You’ve been teaching her to shoot?”

He looked embarrassed. “Sure, why not? Girl that pretty needs to know how to shoot, just to keep the boys off. Hell, I taught you, too, for the same reason. Or don’t you remember?”

“That was different.”

“The hell it was.”

“The hell it _was._ I didn’t run off to join the Minutemen!”

“Well, that’s true. Any idea when she left?”

Annie buried her face in her hands. “Saturday, I think. She went to a friend’s in the afternoon, said she was sleeping over for the weekend. She’s been so upset since Mom died. I was just happy to see her back to her old self. Nick, where would she go?”

“Well let’s think about this a minute. What does Jack say?”

“He doesn’t know – he had to go out to Jamaica Plain last night to install some water purifiers. Nick, I don’t know what to do.”

“Okay, okay… let’s stay calm here.” Nick paced the room, thinking aloud. “They had a recruiting station set up in the Market, but that was just temporary. And I doubt she’d have gone down to the Castle to sign up. For one thing, the General would have put her on the next coach home. That just leaves the frontier posts, really. There isn’t anywhere else they take new recruits. Fort Carlisle, maybe. It’s a major post, and she was partying with a bunch of recruits a while back and that’s where they were heading. Of course, that’s assuming she even got as far as the city gates. Have you checked with her friends?”

“Only Liz -- the girl whose house she was supposed to be staying at. When she didn’t show up before  school this morning, I went over there. I thought she was skipping again. But they hadn’t seen or talked to her all weekend.”

“Okay. You’d better do a canvass of her other friends first. Maybe she talked to someone. Send the girls. And while you’re at it, check with Security. If she left the city, someone will have seen her go. Unless she grew wings and flew out, which doesn’t seem likely.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll head up to Carlisle. You get a message down to Nate, tell him what’s going on and ask him to spread the word, in case I miss her. When is Jack due back?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Okay. Unless you hear something, make sure he stays put.”

“Why?”

“In case I need him. I’ll send a message once I figure out what’s going on and he can come meet me if necessary. With any luck, I’ll catch word of her on the road. Either way, I’ll keep in touch.”

Annie sighed. “This is all my fault, Nick. We… let her get away with things. I let her get away with things. Jack wanted us to lay down the law, but I loved my little wild child. I always figured she’d settle down after a while. Jack will say I was too easy on her. And I was.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. Lily’s a fine kid. She’s probably holed up somewhere, hungry and cold and too damned stubborn to come home. I’ll find her and I’ll bring her back. Okay?”

“I just can’t believe she’d do something like this.”

Nick laughed. “Can’t you? I knew a girl once, fell in love with a wounded Gunner, after Quincy. Nursed him back to health, decided she was gonna marry him. Anyone who didn’t like it could go ‘shove their sensory cluster up their waste disposal orifice’ I believe is what she said. I hear he fixes water purifiers nowadays.”

Annie smiled. “I hear he does.” Her smile disappeared. “Nick, you have to find her. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with joining up. But she has to finish school first. And I worry about her out there by herself. Gun or no gun, she’s still a little girl out alone, and travelling the Commonwealth isn’t a walk in the park, even now.”

 “Well, I agree. Don’t worry, Annie. I’m already out the door.”

 

-OOO-

 

In fact, it took somewhat longer than that, starting with a trip to the market to roust Antonio out of bed and undergo the indignities of a major overhaul. He had a little stock of spare parts he’d been holding onto, in case of emergencies. This didn’t feel like one, yet. But he’d had a lot of time in the last couple days to worry about the General’s news. If there was trouble coming, he’d like to face it with knees that didn’t ache when it rained. Besides, walking out of the shop with brand new knee joints,  a re-lined combustion chamber and new battery plates made him feel  better than he had in a very long time. He was whistling by the time he got back to the office.  

He’d need provisions. Whiskey was his old standby because of its a high calorie count and portability. It wouldn’t get him drunk anymore, now that his power couplings had been re-tuned. He’d have to get Antonio to fix that when he got back. He wrapped a pair of bottles in an old towel and stowed them in his travelling pack, then added two more. Whiskey had other uses besides feeding his power cells. A few boxes of shells went in next, and some extra quick loads for his revolver. His lockpicks and hacking tools he always carried with him, of course, but he threw in two extra pairs of reading glasses and a sack of bottlecaps, the universal coinage of post-Apocalypse America. As an afterthought he added a pair of nice binoculars he’d found while scrounging through a department store once, and a battered copy of Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep”, which he’d been meaning to get around to re-reading one of these days.

He frowned, then went to the footlocker beside the desk and took out a pair of fragmentation grenades. There was a single stimpack in there and a pouch with an assortment of combat meds, which he also packed. He couldn’t have said exactly why, except he had a nagging feeling of being on the edge of something bigger and potentially more explosive than it seemed. He rifled through the filing cabinet by his desk until he found an old US Army Corps of Engineers map of Cheshire County. It was pre-War, of course. The date on it was 2071. But it was beautifully detailed and had been heavily annotated. On a foggy day, a compass and a good map can save your life. And he had a built-in compass.

There was one last thing. Reaching into his desk drawer he took out a small, metal box. Inside was a stack of paper – letters, old photographs and assorted memorabilia, the kind of flotsam and jetsam people – even robots – acquire over the course of their lives. At the very bottom was an envelope, addressed to Nick Valentine, care of the Boston Police Department. It was badly water-stained and the letter inside was old and brittle. He unfolded it carefully.

 

_Sawyer’s Bridge Lodge_

_Swanzey, NH_

 

_Dear Nicky:_

_I hope you will forgive me for doing it this way. If I was braver, I would have taken the train down to Boston to see you in person. But I’m not brave. I never have been. You were always the brave one, and now that isn’t enough._

_Nick, it’s been a great run for us. Especially after everything you’ve been through. And I know we’ve talked seriously about the future. But some things have come up. I can’t say more. It’s work related, all “burn-before-reading” stuff. You know. But it means I’m being transferred again._

_I know what you’ll say, that you’ll wait. But we’ve both played that game before and it never ends well. There’s other things, too. I don’t mean to be mysterious. I just can’t talk about it. Will you please believe me when I say it’s not about you? What a terrible cliché. I’m sorry. But it’s nothing you said or did, or didn’t say or didn’t do, or some weird fault about you I couldn’t get over. And there isn’t anyone else.  Not that there ever won’t be, I suppose,  but I promise, cross-my-heart-hope-to-die that I’m not replacing you with someone “better”?  (How could there ever be such a person?)_

_If I could tell you everything, I know you would understand. This breaks my heart, too._

 

_Love,_

_Meredith_

 

He refolded the letter and put it back in its envelope then after a moment’s hesitation slipped it into an inside pocket. He took a look at the heavy combat shotgun in its cabinet against the wall then shook his head. Damned thing had a kick like a horny radstag. Probably tear his shoulder off.

He took one last look around the place, taking in the untidy piles of gear in the corner he’d always meant to get straightened up, the stack of papers on his desk and all the other bits and pieces piled hither and yon. Clutter had always been his personal nemesis. Well, he’d worry about it when he got back.

He didn’t for a minute doubt that Lily was on her way to the nearest Minuteman recruiting station. Nor was it certain she would come back with him. She had all her mother’s stubbornness plus some of her own. Technically, she was too young to join the Minutemen. But that wasn’t a rule, just a guideline. Probably he could ask Nate to get her recruitment quashed. But he wasn’t sure his relationship with Lily would survive that kind of interference.

There were worse things she could do with her life than join the Minutemen. He’d made up his mind some time ago to talk to Nate about it when the time was right. But off she went, in typical Lily fashion, throwing twenty wrenches into everyone’s well laid plans.

He sighed, adjusted his satchel and left, locking the door behind him.

It was late morning by now, and Lily’s sister’s had reported back. Whatever she’d  had planned, she hadn’t shared it with any of her friends.  The guards at Diamond City’s main gate had logged her out just after noon on Saturday, but there was no record of her return, and a search of her room had revealed clothes missing as well as travelling gear and her sturdy hiking boots. Ellie’s pistol was indeed gone from its spot on the shelf, along with the box of spare shells and two more besides that Nick knew she had kept in a lower drawer.  She’d had a holster made for it, too, although technically it was a “belly gun” – the hammer and sights filed down so it could be drawn easily from a purse or waistband without danger of catching anything. But a holster was always going to be a faster draw, and this was missing too.

The sergeant on duty at the gate Saturday night just shrugged, stony-eyed, when a furious Annie demanded to know why they’d let a child out of the city on her own without asking where she was going. “It’s a free country, lady,” he’d answered. “Not my job to keep tabs on people old enough to look after themselves. Besides, she was dressed for the weather and packing heat like she knew how to use it. I’d’a stopped her if I thought there was a problem.”

Privately, Nick agreed, but Annie was worried sick and so here he was, on the road again. On the other hand, it was a beautiful spring afternoon, and he felt better than he had in quite some time. With a jaunty wave to Annie and the girls, he turned his face north, toward the frontier.

-OOO-


	3. Chapter 3

The Minuteman post at Carlisle was straight north of Concord, a long day’s walk from Diamond City. For Nick, since he was getting a late start, it meant over-nighting either in Lexington or Concord, depending on which road he took. Which meant the first order of business was figuring out which road Lily had taken. The Lexington Road was the most direct route. But it wasn’t the only one, especially if she was trying to duck any pursuit. There was also the possibility she’d changed her mind on the way there. Or run into trouble. She might even be on her way back. If so, he didn’t want to miss her.

There were daily passenger and freight coaches to both Concord and Lexington from DC, but they left early in the morning. Leaving after lunch, Lily would have missed the coach and so, like Nick, been forced to walk. She might even have planned it that way. He stopped to talk to the ticket agent anyway, on the office chance she’d inquired about fares.

“Haven’t seen her,” the woman said, handing Nick the photograph he’d shown her.

“You’re sure about that?” he prodded, holding the picture up. It showed Lily sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, pencil in hand and a harassed look on her face.

“Annie’s girl, right?” She shook her head. “Sorry, Nick. She definitely didn’t buy a ticket. I see her, I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”

“Thanks.”

On a hunch, Nick showed the photo to a pair of off-shift drivers lounging in the sunshine nearby, finishing off their lunches.

“Sure, I seen her,” one said. “Yesterday, on the way back from Lexington. Just the other side of the bridge. Blonde hair, red backpack, right? I told her I’d give her a ride if she was willing to pay the fare, if you know what I mean.” He spat juicily at a crow eyeing the remains of his sandwich. “Flipped me the bird, the little bitch. Too bad for her. When Big Jim Baker gives you a ride, baby, you know you been rode.”

Nick glared at him. “She’s sixteen.”

The driver waved dismissively. “Sure, pal, sure. I’m just talkin’. Don’t get your shorts in a knot.”

Nick left them. He guessed it would have been getting dark by the time she hit Lexington, but there were a couple of good travellers’ inns on the road in and he was reasonably certain she would have stayed in one of them. Carlisle was a half-day’s hike after that, which meant she’d have arrived yesterday afternoon. Which, Nick thought, meant she had probably been a sworn-in Minutemen recruit for a full day now. Barring catastrophe or cold feet along the way.

It was a good day for walking and Nick let his stride lengthen. The sun was warm and bright over his shoulder and there was a light breeze out of the west that carried with it the scent of wet earth and green, growing things. He smiled to himself. It had been some time since he’d left Diamond City. As always, he was amazed at the way Boston had changed in the half-century since the fall of the Institute. Although many of the sturdier pre-War structures still stood -- nowadays largely refurbished and re-built -- the endless swamp of shattered buildings that had made post-War Boston such a charming place to live was being gradually cleared. There were rough areas, still, but there also new buildings and vegetable gardens in places that had once been the haunt of raiders and ferals. He waved to a young couple planting potatoes in an empty lot next to the old Parkview Apartments building. He was digging, she was following behind, plopping the seed potatoes into the holes and covering them with moist earth. They waved at him as he passed, smiles on their dirt-smeared faces.

The same went for the ubiquitous piles of collapsed rubble and the fleets of ruined vehicles that had once choked the streets. Like the ravaged buildings, they had been scrapped and cut up, melted down and re-purposed.

It hadn’t all been peace, love and kumbaya. The fall of the Institute had left a power vacuum in the Commonwealth that a number of groups scrambled to exploit. It had been a near thing. Welded together under the charismatic leadership of Nate Howard, the Minutemen and the Railroad stayed loyal. But they weren’t enough. The Minutemen were still re-building in those days and the Railroad had suffered badly in the assault on the Institute. In the end it was only the arrival of civilian militias from the outlying settlements and the heroic last stand of defectors from the Brotherhood of Steel led by the renegade, Danse, that saved Diamond City.

The Brotherhood itself had stayed aloof, calling its ground units back to the Prydwen, the flying fortress that served as their base of operations. There they waited, preparing their own assault against the weakened city below. It had been a mistake. Realizing the danger, agents of the Railroad infiltrated the Prydwen, capturing the control room and then, when the explosive charges they’d set failed to detonate, flying the giant ship at full power into the ground. Cut off from all support, the few remaining Brotherhood units had either attacked and been slaughtered, or surrendered.

The victory at Diamond City broke the back of the local raider gangs and sent the much-more dangerous Gunners scrambling back to their bases around Quincy. In the years that followed Quincy was re-taken and the Gunners finally destroyed. That, together with the pacification of the super mutants after the Siege of Goodneighbour, had finally brought stability to the Commonwealth. For nearly 20 years, peace had reigned.

With peace had come prosperity. An entire generation had come of age without knowing war or hunger, fear or want. But the lessons of the past remained. People still built with an eye toward defense, and at ground-level, buildings an armoured face to the street. The Boston Nick walked through now lacked much of the warmth and openness of the one he remembered from before the War.

On the other hand, you rarely got jumped by ferals anymore.

The nuclear chain reaction that destroyed the Institute had also had destroyed the only real possibility of re-building the Commonwealth as it had been before the Great War. “What if?” It was a game Nick and some of the others often played. Would Father’s unswerving fanaticism have survived his death? Could the ingrained mistrust of the Institute in the Commonwealth have been overcome? Or even: “What if the Institute had won?”

They would never know, now, and the gradual deterioration of the technical infrastructure that had survived the War was nearly complete -- the victim of scavengers, of war, and of the ravages of time. The seemingly inexhaustible micro-fusion plants that had kept so many lights burning and equipment functioning gradually failed, and when they did, there was no one left who could repair them. Nor did the tools and technology exist to make those repairs. With some exceptions, the Commonwealth of today was a lot like it had been in that long-ago time when the first Minutemen scrambled to defend their homes against their erstwhile redcoat masters.

Except for the guns, of course. No matter how far civilization fell, people always seemed to manage to hold onto their guns.

There had been refugees a-plenty after the fall of the Institute. That had been a problem. Most of the escaping synths had moved on to new homes farther up the coast; the Railroad had seen to that. But the humans – hapless civilians mostly, fleeing for their lives with nothing but the clothes on their backs – had to be integrated into Commonwealth society. There had been difficulties. Many had fallen victim to raiders and slavers. There had been gang rapes and lynch mobs. Nick growled at the memory.

He crossed the Charles over the old lift bridge. It wouldn’t lift again any time soon, but someone had patched the worst of the holes and the crossing wasn’t quite the adventure it had once been. The road was closed at the other end of the bridge and a large “Radiation Zone” sign marked where a detour swung wide around where the Institute had been. A fortified guard tower stood there. Owing to the high radiation, the ruins here remained largely unchanged. It was one of the few places in the Commonwealth where dark things still lurked and Nick was glad to fall in with a patrol heading in his direction. He asked for news of Lily. Someone had indeed noticed her -- “a girl with a red backpack, travelling alone” safely past the danger zone. Nick breathed a small sigh of relief.

To the north and west stood Cambridge University, on College Square just past the old Cambridge Police Post. It was the first institution of higher learning to be built in Boston in 250 years. It was modest as yet, specializing in agricultural research and environmental remediation. Nate’s adopted son, Shaun, was Rector there. He’d been at Ellie’s funeral but there hadn’t been much chance to talk and Nick promised himself he would stop in on the way back.

The sun was westering by the time he reached Lexington. The pre-War elevated superhighway through here had been largely restored and was home to a glitzy new retail and commercial district. But there were several small, family-run hostels near the old bus station, and Nick guessed that Lily would have found these more to her liking. He struck pay dirt on the second one.

“Oh, yeah. I seen her.” The big woman behind the counter handed Nick back his photo. She was middle-aged, pleasant-faced but with shrewd eyes, and hands roughened from work. She had a motherly smile, though, and Nick liked her immediately. “Told me she was up to see her brother at Carlisle. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t, weren’t my business to pry. But she seemed to be in good spirits and she weren’t hurting none that I could see. And she had the caps to spend.”

“Did she stay here?”

“Oh, sure. Not so many travellers come in since the coach line moved its stop up to the overpass, but I still keep my rooms clean and fresh. Most of my income these days is from selling drinks.” She nodded at the open door across the room, through which Nick could see a few rough-looking men standing at a long bar.

She followed his gaze. “I run a decent house. I don’t allow trouble and I got rules about minors in the bar, especially pretty, unaccompanied girls. Even honest-looking ones. My clientele is mostly single men working salvage up at the old Corvega plant, and they like their whiskey. Letting a girl in there on a Saturday night is just asking for trouble.”

“Was she any trouble?”

“Hell, no. I told her the rules, she was fine. Took her meal up to her room myself, made sure she was settled and comfortable then saw her on her way in the morning.”

The woman looked at Nick. “I recognize you,” she said. “You’re that detective fellow, ain’t you? From Diamond City.” She looked smug. “I pegged her for a runaway minute I laid eyes on her. Her people sent you to bring her home, I’m guessing.” Nick nodded, not wanting to get into complicated explanations. “Well, I’m sure you’ll find her,” she continued. “All I know is she said she was heading up to Carlisle Station. There’s a town there, just down from the fort. It’s no place for a girl alone, but I told her to stop at Hank Pretty’s place if she needed somewhere to stay. It’s on the road into town. He’s an old friend. You go there, tell him Linda Sykes sent you. He’ll do you right.”

“Mighty kind of you,” Nick said.

“Least I can do,” the woman answered. “You tracked down a deadbeat once, years ago. Owed my pop a considerable sum of money. Lemuel Sykes, my pop, ran a little trading outfit out of Bunker Hill back in the day.”

Nick shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t remember.”

“That’s okay. It were small potatoes for a high roller like you, I expect. But you did us a real service and my Pop was always grateful. It’d be an honour if you stayed here tonight. On the house.”

Nick accepted the offer, ignoring the little voice that was urging him to press on. He’d felt a growing sense of urgency about this trip: a desire to see it through quickly that had less to do with worrying about Lily and more with his own need to return to familiar surroundings. He was, he suddenly realized, out of his comfort zone and it was making him feel a bit dislocated. It jarred him to think that he even had a comfort zone, or that being out of it could cause him this much anxiety. On the other hand, he was tired. Even with his new plates, his charging system wasn’t what it had once been. What he really needed was to get some organics into his system, run a diagnostic and shut down for the night.

The room was small and simply furnished, but it was clean and quiet. Nick ate the meal she brought and took a couple healthy slugs of whiskey, then ran a series of maintenance routines on himself before stretching out on the bed preparatory to shutting himself down. On an impulse, he took the letter out of his pocket and read it again:

_“…If I could tell you everything, I know you would understand. This breaks my heart, too. Love, Meredith.”_

Funny thing was, he didn’t remember anyone named Meredith.

He closed his eyes. In the darkness, he dreamed…

 

-OOO-

 

There was a light, and then darkness, and then a long, confused time: a tumult of voices and faces, scattered images wrenched out of context, pouring over him like a river in spate. He tried to concentrate. There was a name, and he grabbed on to it like a drowning man reaching for a rope. He felt the beginnings of memory tease him, and he reached for it. But there was a noise from somewhere, like a door banging repeatedly in the wind. Memory fled, running out between his fingers like a dream fading on sudden waking. Despair filled him. And then it was just him and the gate, banging, again and again, and wherever he’d been before, now he was here. Wherever here was.

He opened his eyes. The world swam in shapeless blobs of light. Unnamed colours flashed and faded and there was a blast of music, shrill and discordant, that swirled around him like an angry demon learning to play the bagpipes. And cold. A deadly, life-taking cold that pawed at him with icy fingers. Oddly, he did not actually feel coldness, nor the rough, broken surface on which he lay sprawled, his body tilted at an ungainly angle. Instead, he simply recognized their existence, as if they were a story told by a stranger or something he’d seen on TV.

He tried to marshal his thoughts but they kept drifting off, and he realized his grasp on consciousness was tenuous. There was an insistent hum in his ears, a high-pitched buzzing that slowly rose in volume. There were voices within it, he realized. Dozens of them, all talking at once. Voices that murmured and shouted, that chanted and droned, that mumbled and roared, all mixed together in an incomprehensible babble.

A female voice rang out above the others, speaking in urgent tones:

“…gency reserves falling. Levels, 2.02 per cent, and falling. … 0.98% and falling. Warning, system failure. Warning, approaching depletion. Repair systems offline. Repair systems offline. Warning: permanent shut down imminent. Shut down imminent… ” Other voices – the same voice, maybe, reeling off columns of meaningless numbers, but more quietly now, fading into the background hum that was getting louder and louder. The colours fled from his vision and the world went dark around him. He was, he realized, about to die.

Then he smelled it: a putrid, charnel-house stench that filled his nostrils and triggered a sensation like hunger. But hunger of an intensity he had never felt before, manifesting itself as searing pain. He doubled up and rolled over, feeling something soft and wet beneath him. Something sticky smeared across his lips and face. Reflexively, he opened his mouth, and then he was tearing at it with his teeth, ripping off huge chunks of flesh from something, barely chewing before swallowing down. One mouthful. Two. His hunger was a living thing. Mindlessly, he devoured. From somewhere inside of him he heard a sound like a “click-click-click” and then a surging heat in in his belly. The buzzing in his ears began to fade and through it he could hear the woman’s voice again.

“…minent…. Calculating. Energy levels…. 1.25 % and rising…. 2.2% …. 5.5%. Rising. Diagnostic systems on-line. Calculating. Main capacitor failure. Initiating manual over-ride. …. Re-booting…”

Still he ate, repulsed by the smell but unable to stop, until the heat in his belly was a raging bonfire. And still the voices droned or muttered or chanted, and the numbers rose.

Finally he opened his eyes again and looked around. The world spun and turned, then resolved itself into focus. Around him all was ruin: a landscape of reeking garbage and broken things stretching out on all sides under a cold, grey sky. A small shed, weather-beaten, stripped of its paint by time and the elements, stood nearby and its door was open, caught by the relentless wind and slamming repeatedly against its frame. In the distance stood the towers of a city, broken and fallen. A rusted tricycle stood beside him and beneath him was the body of a man, bloated and decayed, eye sockets empty, mouth open in silent horror. Maggots were crawling in and out of it, and the belly was freshly torn open, shreds of skin and intestine glistening wetly in the bleak, winter light. Nick gagged and looked down at his hands. Then he began to scream.

 

-OOO-

 

He awoke with a start, jerking himself upright, his main circulatory pump thudding in his chest. He stared around the room, unsure of where he was or how he’d gotten there. Then memory returned and he calmed down, over-riding his emergency systems to bring his metabolic rate back down to normal functioning. He took a deep breath.

“That was a bad one,” he said to the room. It had been a long time since he’d had that particular dream, a re-enactment of the day he’d awoken to find himself, not Nick Valentine from Chicago, a detective on loan to the Boston Police Department, but some futuristic cybernetic creature, a robot with human memories, naked, battered and alone on a garbage heap on the outskirts of a ruined city, with no memory of anything after lying back in an exam room at the Cambridge Institute where he’d gone for neurological testing.

It had taken him weeks to learn how to function. The voices were the worst part, the constant chatter of data flowing back and forth that was the various parts of his body talking to itself. Sensory inputs, command-and-control, diagnostic controls, maintenance routines, all the various systems -- autonomic and otherwise – the controlled his body. He’d learned how to interpret them eventually. More important, he’d learned to distinguish between things he actually needed and the endless streams of routine information that could be ignored. Nowadays he barely noticed them.

Nick rolled out of bed and ran a diagnostic. He was a bit stiff from yesterday’s unaccustomed exercise. Other than that, he felt pretty good. The sun was up, and to judge from the light coming in through the curtains, it was going be another nice day.

The innkeeper was back at her desk when he came down. A dark-haired young man sat on a stool beside her, reading a book on the counter.

“Good morning,” she said, looking up. “Sleep okay?”

“I did, thanks. Nice room. Very comfortable. I’ll be back this way day after tomorrow, I hope. Probably I’ll stop in again.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for you.” She paused. “Listen, Mr. Valentine. You might want to be a bit careful going through town.”

“How’s that?” Nick raised an eyebrow.

“Well… not rightly sure how to put this. It’s just… we don’t get too many like you around here, and folk hereabouts still tell stories about the bad old days. Synths and war-bots, stuff like that. The locals would be fine, of course. We’re not some hick town stuck out in the bush somewhere. But them good ol’ boys they brought in to work up at the plant, well… Close up you don’t really pass for human, and some of them might shoot first, ask questions later.” She nodded at the boy beside her. “If you like, I’ll have my Sam see you safe to the other side of town.”

Nick was at first inclined to refuse. He didn’t doubt he could handle any problems that might arise. On the other hand, the last thing he needed was trouble. His sense of urgency had returned, worse now than before, and the need to get to Carlisle without delay was an almost physical compulsion.

In any event, nothing untoward happened on the trip through Lexington. He bade the boy farewell at the northern outskirts and tipped him with a handful of caps, then turned his face once more to the northwest.

There was a steady stream of traffic on the road. Most of it was slow-moving stuff, farm wagons and the like. A couple of times, mounted couriers had come clattering the other way. Once it was a procession of what were clearly refugees from the north: tired, beaten-looking people pushing their belongings on handcarts and driving a few half-starved cattle ahead of them. Minutemen on horseback accompanied them, armed and watchful.

Nick moved purposefully, ignoring the occasional startled glance or look of recognition. It had been some years since he’d been up this way, and in its own way, the country had changed as much as Boston had. It was all farms here now, with long lines of split-rail fences and neatly-painted houses. It reminded Nick very much of his childhood, of summers spent at his grandparents’ farm out in the Midwest. A dog followed him for a while, barking through the fence, and cattle stopped in mid-chew to watch him go by. It was rich country, thanks in no small part to the blood that had been spilled over it. Ironically, in the name of peace.

Nick thought about the General’s story, and shivered.

It was just past noon when he arrived at Fort Carlisle. The Minuteman post was on higher ground over-looking Carlisle Station, where an ancient railway crossed the highway a few miles west of where the old town of Carlisle had once stood. At the crossroads below the fort, a busy settlement had grown up. As is the nature of these things, it was wholly parasitic on the fort above. A cluster of taverns and brothels, restaurants and gaming houses lined the main street. On the streets leading off of it were rooming houses and stables, shops and trading posts. One small building announced “Baths – 5 caps – Guaranteed hot” and a small pre-War church stood next to town offices and the Commonwealth Postal Service Building.

Nick stopped in to see Hank Pretty, bringing greetings from Linda Sykes. Hank was a likeable old chatterbox, and Nick got the impression very little happened in Carlisle Station that he didn’t know about. Except for Lily.

“Nope, ain’t seen her. Sorry. Girl travelling alone, I’d remember. Enlistment office is two blocks up. Big Minuteman flag flying right out front. Can’t miss it.”

 

-OOO-

 

The recruiting station was a small, wood-framed building just off Main Street. Inside there were a few uncomfortable-looking chairs pushed up against the walls and a pair of filing cabinets in one corner behind a desk where a bored-looking young second lieutenant sat. A magazine lay open beside him, but he was currently filling out a form, which he pushed across the desk at the would-be recruit standing in front of him.

“Sign here and here,” he said without looking up, “then take these to the recruiting sergeant.” He jerked a thumb at the door behind him then rang the bell on the desk. “Next,” he called, taking a new form from the drawer. He glanced up as Nick stepped forward.

“Sorry, too old,” he snapped dismissively, putting his pen down. Then he looked again, and frowned. “We don’t take your kind anyway.”

“Lucky for both of us,” Nick replied agreeably. “But I’m not here to sign up. I’m looking for a girl.” He took Lily’s picture out of his pocket and slid it across the desk. “She might have been in yesterday or earlier today.”

The officer glanced briefly at the picture then pushed it back at Nick. “If you’re looking for teenage girls, you’ve come to the wrong place. Try Mother Murphy’s down the road.” He reached for his magazine.

Nick scowled, his eyes narrowing. “This is the Minuteman enlistment office, isn’t it? This particular girl would have tried to enlist. She’s a runaway. Her family is worried about her.” He fished out a business card and put it on the desk. “Nick Valentine, Private Detective” it said.

“Look, Mister --” he looked at the card “—Valentine. She hasn’t been in today, and if she had, we’d have sent her home to her mother.”

“But maybe she came in yesterday?” Nick persisted.

“No idea. Now if you’ll excuse me?” He made to reach again for his magazine. Nick put his hands flat on the desk and leaned across, his eyes burning bright yellow.

“See here, youngster,” he said. “That girl should have got into town yesterday afternoon. She was aiming to come here. And I need to find her. That means I need to talk to whoever was working this desk yesterday.”

The man’s face darkened. “Now, you look here --” he began.

“Sir? Is there a problem?” An older man in sergeant’s chevrons poked his head through the door, an amiable expression on his face.

“Finally,” the lieutenant snapped, turning toward the new arrival. “This, this person --” he began.

The sergeant ignored him. “Caught some of that from the other room, sir,” he said, coming over to Nick. “Let me see that photograph.”

Nick held it out. The sergeant took a quick look and gave it back. “Came in yesterday,” he said. “A little after lunch, as I recall.” He grinned. “Feisty one, too. Wasn’t very happy when we told her to come back in a couple years.”

“Any idea where she went after that?”

“Said she had a friend up at camp, a recruit named Garcia. We sent her up there. They take recruits there, too. Could be someone up there signed her up.”

Nick thanked the man and left. Walking away, he heard him address the recruiting officer in quiet tones:

“Beggin’ yer pardon, sir, but you do know who that is, right? Him and the General were bosom pals back in the day. I heard they took out the Institute single-handed. Blew it right up. With all due respect, word got back you slagged him off, good chance of you bein’ the first officer to spend the rest of his career on latrine duty. Also, last time I checked, we were in the business of helping people when they asked for it. Instead of acting like dicks. Sir.”

Nick grinned to himself. Maybe there was hope for the military yet.

A troop of mounted scouts were on their way out of the fort as Nick made his way up the road, and he stepped back to let them pass. Close by, a group of fresh recruits were drilling, executing the same manoeuvres that recruits had been sweating over since the Napoleonic Wars, five hundred years before. The air was full of barked commands and the stamping feet raised a cloud of dust from the packed earth of the parade ground. Nick scanned the recruits hopefully, but Lily wasn’t there.

He had to explain his mission first to the guards at the gate and then again to the officer of the watch who had been summoned to deal with him. She listened to him then took his photograph and business card and disappeared inside. She came back a few minutes later.

“Sorry, sir,” she said, giving Nick back his photograph. “She hasn’t been here as far as I can tell. We’ve had a ton of new recruits the last while, but someone would have remembered her coming in yesterday. There are recruiting stations at Acton and Zimonja, too. Maybe she went there?”

Nick sighed. “There’s a young fellow from Diamond City here, a friend of hers named Howie Garcia, enlisted a few weeks ago. She might have tried to contact him. Is there any way I can talk to him?”

“That we can arrange,” she said. “His unit’s out on an exercise. I’ll send a runner.”

She escorted Nick to a small, comfortably-furnished room off a busy office and asked him to wait. Time passed slowly, and Nick found himself fidgeting. Finally, Howie Garcia was ushered in. He was dressed in stained, dust-covered overalls. His face was smudged with dirt and there were bits of twig and dried grass poking out of his hair. But there was a spring to his step and he carried himself with an air of self-assurance that had been noticeably absent just a few weeks before. His face brightened when he saw Nick and he covered the space between them in two long strides, holding out his hand and grinning widely.

“Mr. Valentine! What are you doing here?” Then his face fell. “Did my mother send you? Is everything okay?”

“Your mother’s fine, last I heard,” Nick said, standing up and shaking Howie’s proffered hand. “She says you haven’t written in a couple of weeks, though.”

“Yeah, I know.” Howie gestured guiltily at his dirty overalls. “They keep us going pretty much from sun up to lights-out around here. Doesn’t leave time for much else. But I will write. I promise.”

“That’d be a good idea. Unless you want her to show up unannounced one of these days.”

Howie blanched. “No! Tell her I’ll write. Today. Anyway,” he added, “graduation’s in two more weeks. I’ll see her then. But why are you here?”

“I’m looking for Lily.”

“Lily?” Howie looked confused. “She’s here?”

“You haven’t seen her?”

He shook his head. “I got a letter from her last week. But I haven’t seen her since I left DC.”

 

-OOO-

 


	4. Chapter 4

“You’re sure?” he said. “She told them down at the recruiting station she was coming up here to see you.”

“The recruiting station? She’s going to enlist? That’s great.” His face fell. “But no; she’s too young. No way they’d let her join. Hell, they found out a couple of the guys in my group were underage and sent them home right away.”

Nick nodded. “So she discovered. But if she didn’t come see you, where did she go?”

Howie shook his head. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe she just went home. I can see where that would embarrass her. Maybe she just didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Yeah, well it’s too late for that. Is there anywhere else she might have gone? What about your buddy, Garrick? Has she been in touch with him, do you know?”

Howie laughed. “Garrick washed out the second day. He complained to the Lieutenant about having to share a tent with ‘coloureds’. Lieutenant allowed as maybe he and the Minutemen weren’t a good fit after all, gave him five minutes to get his dumb ass over the horizon. He’s still hanging around, though. Some of the guys said they saw him working the door down at Frolick’s. That’s a bar down in town,” he added. “We’re not supposed to be in there. Don’t tell Mama! She wouldn’t like it if she heard I even knew about that kind of place. But that’s all I know.”

Nick left , promising to send a message when he found out about Lily. He was more worried than he cared to admit, even to himself. Lily and Howie had been best friends since they were little. He didn’t believe she would have come this far and not try to visit him, no matter how disappointed -- or embarrassed – she was. Still, Howie was right about one thing. Lily didn’t take kindly to failure. The fact that she hadn’t told him she was coming could have meant she was protecting herself, in case they turned her down.

He replayed the sequence of events in his mind, trying to guess at her next move. It was Tuesday today. She’d left Diamond City on Saturday and arrived in Carlisle the next day, Sunday. Turning around and coming straight back by the shortest route – through Lexington – would have had her home by Sunday night or Monday afternoon at the latest. Either way, odds are he would have either heard news of her or run into her on the road. Even taking the long road through Concord would have only added a half day to her trip, if that, and if she’d come home after he left, a fast courier would have caught up with him.

Knowing Lily, she’d be mortified at having to crawl back with her tail between her legs, especially after the letter she’d left to her parents. Nick considered the possibility, as he’d suggested to Annie, that she was holed up somewhere, too stubborn and too embarrassed to come home. But he had his doubts. Wild though she might be, Lily had her grandmother’s unwavering pragmatism. More important was the bond that existed between her and the rest of her family. Lily’s pride might lead her to colour the facts a bit, and Nick could imagine her earnest explanations about how guilty she felt for simply leaving without a word. But it wouldn’t stop her from coming home, nor would she consider for a moment that they wouldn’t welcome her back with open arms. So if she hadn’t come home yet, something else had happened.

Nick looked around for someone who could point him in the direction of Frolick’s.

 

-OOO-

 

“Haven’t seen her. Nice looking girl, though. I’d know if she came in here. ” The bartender handed Nick back his photograph. The bar was mostly empty. A few townies sat drinking beer around the small stage where a bored-looking black woman lay writhing on a bearskin rug. They were pitching caps at her. Every now and then they crowed excitedly at a particularly lucky hit. When that happened, she moaned without noticeable enthusiasm, the sound barely audible over the music blaring from a cheap radio behind the bar. Although attractive in a tired-looking way, she was not young, and there were old, faded tattoos around her eyes and on her breasts, and stretch marks that showed on her belly and thighs. The barman noticed Nick’s gaze.

“Mostly just whores this time of day,” he said dismissively. “You want to see the real talent, you gotta come at night, after we get busy. Something for every taste. Even yours, probably.”

“Thanks, I’ll pass.” Nick took a drag of his cigarette, let the smoke trickle out slowly. “You have a doorman here, fellow named Garrick. Is he working tonight?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” The bartender re-filled Nick’s glass from the bottle on the counter beside him. Behind them, the dancer had rolled over, drawing her knees up underneath her, spreading her legs and reaching behind herself to separate her labia, making a target for the cap-throwers. She looked over her shoulder at them and licked her lips. One of them climbed onto the stage and the bartender interrupted himself to shout across the room:

“Hey – no touching. You want to touch, you pay up front. Otherwise keep your hands to yourself.” He looked back at Nick. “The kind of people we get in here. Anyway… I ain’t seen Garrick in a couple days. He didn’t show up for his shift on Sunday. Why? What’s he done?”

“Nothing that I know of. Any idea where he went?”

The man shrugged. “No clue. He had a room next door at Mother Kelly’s. You find him, you tell him he owes for his tab.”

 

-OOO-

 

The room the giggling girl led him up to was a temple to the gods of bad taste. Garishly decorated in pinks and reds, with heavy carpet underfoot and floor-length curtains over the windows, it was like being in a box of cheap chocolate candy. Nick was surprised to discover the bed was the usual rectangular shape, even if it was big enough to sleep eight, with a massive, padded pink headboard. Candles burned from every flat surface and the air was thick with the smell of hot wax.

It had been an uncomfortable wait in the sitting room downstairs where half a dozen very young women outdid each other to make him feel welcome. Afternoons must be pretty slow at a whorehouse off a military base, he observed to himself, sipping on the overly-sweet drink someone had brought him. He’d explained his business and offered his card, which the woman lying among the silks and pillows on the bed now waved languidly at him.

With a start, he realized she was ghoul.

“Nick Valentine, the famous detective,” she said in a gravelly voice. “Come to see me! How terribly exciting. I’m your biggest fan.” She patted the bed beside her. “Come tell Mother what she can do for you today.” She leered at him. “Or with you, perhaps? I’ve always wondered about the pleasures of a mechanical man.”

“Mother Kelly,” Nick said formally, crossing the room. “It’s kind of you to see me at such short notice.” She held out a hand and he took it in his, bending over to press his lips to the back of it and noting the long, decorated nails. He straightened up, releasing her hand.

She looked at him with a mixture of amusement and disappointment. “So is it only business that brings you to my bed, Mr. Valentine? And here I had such high hopes when Amy brought me your card.” She sat up and crossed her legs under her in one swift, graceful movement. She was dressed in something flowingly pink and vaguely transparent. She had been a beauty, he guessed, before the radiation got to her. Still was, in her way, with strong cheekbones above a heart-shaped face, and big, deep eyes, and he could see the curve of her still-slim waist beneath the fabric of her nightgown and the outline of her heavy breasts, swaying as she made herself comfortable among the pillows.

She noted his glance and smiled slightly. “They are lovely, aren’t they? I’ve had many tell me so. Men and women, both.” She looked down at the space beside her. “Are you sure I couldn’t tempt you? Just for a little while? But perhaps it wouldn’t be for a little while. Ghoul sex is like potato chips, you know. It’s hard to stop at just one.”

Nick laughed. “I hadn’t heard that before. But looking at you, I believe it. Mother Kelly, I hope you’ll forgive me, but I really am here on business.”

“There’s some might call you a fool for the chance you’re so lightly turning down.”

He shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time. Besides, I’m not really built for that sort of thing. A little oversight on the part of the Institute, I’m afraid.”

She pouted at him. “I’m sure I could think of something appropriate.”

“I’m sure you could. In the meantime -- ” he pulled out Lily’s photograph “—I’m looking for a girl.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place for that,” she said lightly. But Nick wasn’t smiling. “Oh, here,” she said, snatching the photo away from him. “Let me see that.”

She looked it over, long and carefully. “Oh my,” she said, finally. “That is a girl worth looking for. A girl like that could make herself a fortune, with the right teacher.” She looked up at him. “I don’t suppose that’s why you’re looking for her.”

“She’s run away. Her mother’s worried.”

Mother Kelly handed the photo back. “I’ll bet. With eyes like those, she should be easy to find. Just follow the trail of broken hearts.”

“Part of why I’m here,” Nick said. “She might have hooked up with a fellow from up at the fort, kid named Garrick. They said next door he had a room here.”

“He did.” Mother Kelly’s voice got hard. “Little bastard lit out on me, two days ago. I haven’t seen him since.”

“What was he doing here?”

“Frolick next door pays me to board his bully boys for him. It’s a nice bit of extra money for me, plus I like having a young bruiser or two on the premises. Helps keep the customers in line if they know there’s a man in the house. ”

“Did you talk to him? Did he say anything?”

“Not a damned thing. And now he’s gone and Frolick wants his rent back. You think Garrick ran off with your little girl friend, there? Could be. He was a cute little piece. Dumb as a sack of wet fish, but you don’t fuck their brains, that’s what I always say.”

“Sorry?”

Her eyes had gotten dreamy. “Big and stupid… just how I like ‘em. Real big, too, if you know what I mean. I wasn’t halfway done getting tired of that boy. But if your friend there – “ she nodded at the picture “– is looking for something more than just a good lay, she’ll get rid of him pretty quick. A real one trick pony, you know? But what a trick… oh man. Anyway, he’s got a nasty streak, too. I could tell he didn’t have much use for women. Or ghouls. I got the impression he was holding his nose every time we did it. Like he’d rather be anywhere else. But he needed the room, and I told him I came with it, and whatever I wanted to do, he’d better want, too, or he could go live somewhere else. And there ain’t anywhere else in town cheap enough for what Frolick pays his doormen.”

She grinned. “Gotta admit, it turned me on, makin’ him sit up and beg like that. Anyway, I never saw him with any hot little blondes.”

Nick frowned. “And he’s been gone two days. Can I see where he stayed? Maybe he left something behind.”

“Sure. Room’s exactly how he left it.” She reached up and popped the cap on a speaking tube hidden among the hangings on the wall behind her, whistled into it then called. “Amy? You there?” A muffled voice answered in the affirmative. “Good. Send someone up to show Mr. Valentine to Garrick’s room.

She turned to Nick. “I’m sure you don’t approve of what I do.” He started to speak but she cut him off. “No, don’t say it. I’ve been around a long time. I know what men think before they even think it. Even ones like you. You look at that sweet-faced little girl of yours, and you think about my girls downstairs and wonder what kind of vileness lives in me that I could put them through a life like this. But most of them come from a thousand times worse. If it hadn’t been for me, they’d be dead by now. Or worse. Instead, I take ‘em in and patch them up, give them an education and a safe place to live. They come to me broken, and I fix them. Sure, they have to work, and it’s a hard life, sometimes. But show me a life that isn’t? By the time they leave me, they’ll have built up quite a tidy little sum of their own – enough to set up anywhere they please – and still young enough and pretty enough to turn any head they want. My girls are no fools. I make sure they make good choices.”

There was a knock at the door and one of the girls came in. She smiled when she saw Nick and dropped into a little curtsey. “Shall I take him upstairs now, Mother?” she asked.

“Yes, dear.” The old ghoul smiled at Nick. “Forgive me for getting all preachy. My girls matter the world to me. But it was wonderful to finally meet you.” She held out her hand for Nick to kiss. “Perhaps you can make time for me some other day. Now off with you. I have to primp.”

The girl took Nick up a flight of narrow stairs to a tiny room under the eaves, and left him. The room was sparse, with a low bed in one corner next to a wooden chair that doubled as a bedside table, and a narrow chest of drawers opposite. There were two blankets on the mattress – old, but clean and neatly mended, and a towel hanging from a hook by the door. A small window propped partway open overlooked the street below. There was an ashtray on the chair with a scattering of butts in it next to a stub of a candle in a candle holder.

Nick checked the desk first. There was the usual gear: extra pants and shirt – nothing in the pockets – socks and underclothes. A leather case held a gun cleaning kit and a knife sharpener, and there was a box of condoms and a sewing case. Minuteman issue, Nick noted. Stuck in the back of the drawer was an old girlie magazine, well-thumbed. On the cover someone had written “page 16 has your blonde!” Nick flipped to the page. The girl there did look a bit like Lily, he thought, if you discounted the impossibly large breasts or the odd pose she’d contorted herself into.

He put back the magazine and checked the other drawers, pulling them out to check behind them and shining his light around inside. There was a box of shells in there as well. Homemade reloads, by the look of them, but that wasn’t unusual. In the city, the gun dealers usually made their own ammunition. But a boy off the farm or one of the settlements would know how to make his own loads.

Nick folded back the covers on the bed then got down and shone his flashlight into the narrow space under it before finally flipping up the mattress, looking underneath it and feeling around along its edges. He smiled as his fingers found where someone had slit it open, just along the top edge near one corner. He reached in and felt around, pulling out a good-sized pouch and a thin leather walled. The pouch clinked and jingled. Inside was a hundred or so caps and a short, thick-looped gold necklace. The metal was soft and the loops twisted apart easily. There was nothing decorative about it; it was simply an easy way to carry a lot of cash unobtrusively. Travellers had been carrying their money like that for most of history. But it seemed an odd thing for a boy from East Podunk to be wandering around with.

The last thing was the wallet. It was old: pre-War, Nick thought; a billfold for paper money with a little window for an ID card or a credit card on one side and a coin pocket on the other. It was empty except for a note stuffed into the billfold, printed in pen in large, block letters:

“I AM HERE”

 

-OOO-

                    

Nick poured himself another whiskey. He was back in Frolick's. The girl from before was gone, but another one was in her place, putting on a similar, lacklustre performance. The men watching were cut from the same cloth as the ones before, but drunker, and their laughter was louder and the jokes coarser. There were four of them, and they’d taken to heating their caps with cigarette lighters before throwing them at the girl. Nick doubted she was in any shape to notice. Her eyes were unfocussed and her jaw hung slack, and mostly she just lay on her back and stared at nothing while she pawed aimlessly at herself.

Otherwise, the room was empty. Even the bartender was gone, off to pick up a case of whiskey missed in the morning delivery.

Nick turned back to his bottle. Mother Kelly’s had been the high point of the afternoon. Everything else had been one dead end after another. After carefully returning Garrick’s stash to its hidey-hole, he’d gone to the Post Office and arranged for a courier to take a message down to Annie, paying the premium to have them change horses at Lexington, then wait for an answer and come back the same way. Maybe Lily was home already. If so, he’d know before morning.

After that, he’d scouted down the Concorde road a ways. Not too far, just far enough to make sure there wasn’t anything obvious. Like a big sign saying “Lily Went This Way”. Finding nothing obvious, he’d gone back to the fort to see if Garrick had any particular cronies among the other recruits he could talk to. He’d even convinced them to let him search his quarters. Both were dead ends. Whatever Garrick had come with, he’d taken out again, and he hadn’t talked about his plans.

Nick had spent the rest of the afternoon beating the bushes. There was a Sheriff’s office, but the sheriff was out and the clerk there hadn’t seen Lily or Garrick. Nick left his card, then headed down the street, poking his nose into every diner and barroom in town, asking questions and leaving his name and card everywhere he went. He stopped at the church, too, and the offices of the Traveller’s Aid Society and the Ladies Temperance League. No one recognized Lily or knew Garrick other than vaguely as the new doorman at Frolick's. But that was okay. Sometimes when you make enough noise, the right people hear it.

He took another drink. The fact that Garrick had left his things at Mother Kelly’s meant he was either planning to come back or he’d left unwillingly. Or he’d never left at all. Nick frowned, thinking of all the places you could hide a body in a busy garrison town.

Just then, there was a scream from the direction of the stage, followed by the sound of breaking glass and a man’s curse. Nick looked around. The dancer was on her knees on the floor by the stage, struggling as one man held her head up by the hair while another held back her arms. A third was jamming his fingers into her cheeks to force open her mouth while the last one, a swaggering, shaven-headed bruiser in a sweat-stained muscle shirt that may have once been white, was undoing his trousers. He was having some problems with the zipper and the woman shook her head as he tugged at it. Someone slapped her hard and she cried out.

Nick sighed and slid off the bar stool, snagging his bottle from off the counter. It wasn’t any concern of his, and he didn’t doubt it was a scene that played out in here regularly. Still, consent was consent, and even drugged-out prostitutes had the right to say no.

He ambled over to the little group, the whiskey bottle dangling loosely from his left hand. He smiled as he approached and tipped the brim of his hat up.

“Boys,” he said, nodding to the men.

“Get back to your stool, old man,” the one – he of the stuck zipper – said warningly . He did a double take at Nick and scowled. “Whatever the hell you are, this ain’t any of your business.”

Privately, Nick agreed. Still… he glanced at the girl. Her eyes were wide, and she was plainly terrified. Up close, she looked younger than he’d first thought. Maybe twenty. Maybe not.

“I’m pretty sure the lady isn’t interested in whatever you’ve got planned,” he said.

“Really? Ain’t that too bad. Happens we’ve already paid for our time, so I guess she’s gonna just have to suck it up.” He laughed at his own joke and the others joined in.

Nick kept his smile. “Looks to me like she’s changed her mind,” he said mildly. “Maybe you’d better see about getting your money back.”

The men looked at each other. “That ain’t happening, pal. Now beat it, or you’ll wish you had.”

Two of them were carrying, Nick decided: the one holding her hair had a blousy shirt on, unbuttoned and hanging loose over an undershirt and not quite masking something tucked into his waistband. Stuck Zipper had something tucked into his pants at the back and either a short blade or a small back up piece on his ankle, under his slacks. There were jackets hanging over chairs at the table where they’d been sitting, and the one holding her arms glanced over there. Something in a pocket, Nick figured. He slid over a step to put himself between them and the jackets and turned, letting his coat fall open to reveal the butt of his revolver poking out of the shoulder holster under his arm.

“We can do this the easy way,” he told them. “Or the hard way. And the kind of day I’ve had, I’m okay with the hard way.”

The leader snarled, letting go of his zipper and reaching behind his back. Nick flipped the whiskey bottle underhanded at him. The man slapped it away with his other hand and as he did, Nick stepped in and kicked him hard enough between the legs to lift him bodily off the ground. He screamed, high and thin, the homemade pipe pistol he’d been reaching for falling from suddenly nerveless fingers. Nick kicked it away as he turned, drawing his own gun. Blousy Shirt’s hand was coming out and there was a piece in it. Nick brought his barrel down on the man’s wrist, feeling the bone crunch, then up again to crack hard against the side of his head. The man collapsed backwards, stumbling into the other two and sending them all crashing to the floor. Stuck Zipper was on his hands and knees puking, but reaching for his ankle. Nick stomped down on his hand then added a kick in the belly for good measure. A rib cracked and Stuck Zipper went over with a shriek, then shrieked again as he struck his mangled hand on a table leg.

Released, the girl scrambled away, fetching up against the wall where she knelt, shivering. Nick turned to cover the group on the floor. The one he’d hit was in a daze. The other two were trying to scramble to their feet. He brought up his revolver, thumbing back the hammer with a decisive “click”. They stopped moving.

“Jesus, dude,” one said, raising his hands. “We weren’t gonna hurt her, just play a little. For God’s sake don’t shoot.”

Nick risked a quick glance back at the bar. No sign of the bartender. That was good. There was no reason to think he’d take Nick’s side, and he didn’t need another gun behind him. He turned a bit so he could cover the bar. That put the front door behind him, but the bartender had gone out the back, which was presumably how he’d return. Nick bent down quickly, scooping up the two fallen guns and relieving Stuck Zipper of his hideout piece. It was a nice one, a little Derringer, tiny, but well-taken care of and lethal at close range. Nick’s, now.

Straightening up, he motioned at the girl. “Get some clothes on,” he said. “It’s time we found you a new line of work.”

“Please, mister,” she whispered, her arms wrapped around herself. “I just wanted something to eat. I weren’t gonna do nothing. The man said all I had to do was dance a little, maybe take off my clothes. I don’t hardly remember anything after that.”

“Nobody move,” said a new voice from behind Nick, in the direction of the front door, “or I’m going to start blowing off heads.”

Nick froze, his weapon still raised.

“Hands up, all of you. You, too, stranger. And you, Leroy Pratt, didn’t I tell you what would happen if I saw you in here again?” Nick turned his head as a woman came around into his field of view. She was short, not much over four feet tall and almost as wide, with a round face and short-cropped, black hair poking out from under a wide-brimmed Stetson hat. She had a combat shotgun over her shoulder and on the breast of her uniform jacket was a large, silver star.

Nick raised his hands. “Sheriff,” he said.

She nodded. “Nick Valentine, I presume. Matty at the office gave me your message. You can put your hands down. Find that girl some clothes while I sort out this mess.” She prodded Stuck Zipper with her foot and held out a pair of handcuffs. “Give me your hand, Pratt. The other one, you idiot. The one without the broken fingers.” He put out his good hand and she locked a cuff onto it. “Shorty,” she called to one of the others. “You’re next. Get over here.” In a couple of minutes she had the whole group handcuffed together. About then the bartender came back, and a certain amount of excitement ensued after which he, too, was sporting handcuffs. And a large black eye.

“I told you what happens if you mess with me, Frolick,” the sheriff said. “Girl here says she was drugged, held against her will.”

“She’s lying,” he spat from where he sat on the floor propped up against the jukebox, his hands cuffed behind him.

“She ain’t. You’re lying. And like I told you: I don’t care if you have whores in here; it’s a free country. But this ain’t the first time you’ve pulled something like this. You slipped her something in a drink, right? I take a blood sample down to the lab, what’s it going to tell me?” She waved off his protests. “Keep your lying mouth shut. I’m closing you down. Three weeks. That’s how long it’s gonna be before the judge’ll get a chance to hear your case, so that’s how long you’re gonna sit in my jail. If you’re lucky, he’ll just let you off with a fine.

“You can’t do that to me. My business will be ruined.”

“No it won’t and yes I can. Now shut up, or your court date’s gonna be three months instead of three weeks.”

The girl was sitting on a chair by the stage, wrapped in a ragged bathrobe Nick had found thrown in a corner next to some even worse rags he assumed were her clothes. Those he’d left. She was wide-eyed and staring. She seemed to have shaken off the worst effects of whatever she’d been given, but her face was gaunt and pinched, and she was filthy. Her dark hair hung in greasy tangles around her face and there were traces of half-healed scrapes and bruises wherever her skin showed.

“What’s your name, girl?” the sheriff said, turning to her.

“Mona,” the girl answered almost inaudibly. “Mona Everstreet.”

The sheriff took her by the chin and tilted her head up. Her look softened. “You’ve had a rough time of it, haven’t you, honey?” She let her go. “I don’t believe you’re from around here.”

The girl shook her head. “No, ma’am, I come down from Sawyers. We have a farm by there.”

“That’s a long walk. Where’s your people?”

“Dead, I think. Papa for sure. I saw him go down. I don’t know about the others. Please, ma’am, I’m hungry. I ain’t eaten in a while. Man said he’d feed me.”

The sheriff pursed her lips. “I got to haul this lot back to the jug and do up the paperwork. Valentine, you wanna help out, you could take her next door to Mother Kelly’s. Tell her I said to put any charges on my tab. And stay there until I get back; I’m going to need a statement from both of you. We can talk about your missing person then, too.”

 

-OOO-

 

Mother Kelly herself came at the news of Nick’s arrival, hurrying down the stairs as she belted on a surprisingly ordinary-looking terry-cloth housecoat. He was half carrying the girl, who was swooning from hunger and shock.

“What on earth have they done to this child?” she demanded. She took the girl in her arms and led her to a couch, snapping orders all the while. “Irene, go fetch the doctor, and go to the kitchen and tell Clara I need a bowl of soup. Just broth, mind, and a few of those crackers. Poor thing looks like she hasn’t eaten in days. Amy, make up Maria’s old room and find some clean clothes that will fit. And get a bath running.”

“But Mother,” Amy said, “The Reverend’s due any minute, and you know I’m the only one he’ll go with.”

“Well, he’ll just have to live up to his vows this week. Do him good to practice what he preaches once in a while. And get my brushes while you’re at it. And somebody bring brandy.”

“For the girl?”

“For me, idiot. Now move.”

The doctor arrived twenty minutes later. The girl, Mona, was just finishing her soup. When it arrived, she had lifted the bowl in both hands, plainly intending to drink it down in one draft. Mother Kelly stopped her.

“Slowly now, girl,” she said, “You eat it like that, it’ll come right back up again. Your stomach’s too empty. Eat like this.” She spooned up a bit of the broth and held it out for Mona to drink. Then another. Then she took the spoon herself and ate, slowly but steadily, punctuating it with bits of dried cracker dipped in the soup to soften it.

The doctor was a stern-looking older woman in a shapeless cardigan and long skirt, with grey hair pulled up into a tidy bun and glasses perched on the end of her nose. She had a leather satchel in her hand and the pockets of her sweater bulged with odds and ends.

“Another one of your waifs, Maude?” she said, looking the girl over. “Do you have something I can use as an examining room?”

“Show her, one of you,” Mother Kelly said, helping Mona to her feet. “Afterwards, help Amy get her into the bath and get her cleaned up. Look out for lice. And burn that robe she was wearing.” She turned to the doctor. “Come find me in my office after you’re done. C’mon, Valentine. You can give me the story on this while we wait.”

The sheriff arrived just as Nick was finishing his account, pushing her way past the girl who opened the door to announce her. “Maude,” she said with a nod, plopping herself down in the chair beside Valentine.

Mother Kelly smiled across the desk. “Nick was just telling me his story,” she said.

“Was he? Well now he can tell it to me, too.” She pulled a tattered notebook from an inside pocket and hunted around until she found a stub of pencil. “So? From the beginning.”

Nick recounted the events one more time. It was a story quickly told. The sheriff made a few notes then flipped her notebook shut.

“Pretty much like I figured,” she said. “I shook a few more details out of Frolick. Girl he was expecting never showed, so when this one walked in looking for a handout, he figured he’d make do. Got her high enough so she wouldn’t care about whatever sordid shit the paying customers had in mind. Must have miscalculated the dosage.” She made a face. “He ain’t evil, Frolick, he just don’t have much of a conscience. I’m gonna padlock his bar while he’s in custody, though. That’ll put a good-sized dent in his finances, on top of what the judge decides. Dan Frolick might not understand right and wrong very well, but he is mighty sharp when it comes to a balance sheet. He’ll get the message.”

“What about the others?” Nick asked.

“Pratt and the boys? I let ‘em go. Shit kicking you handed out was probably a better lesson than anything the judge would give ‘em anyway. Might teach them a lesson, too, although I doubt it. Them boys are the definition of stupid. But you might give me their guns back, if you don’t mind. ”

Nick made a face. “I’d hate to get a bullet in the back from out of a dark alley.”

She pursed her lips. “I don’t imagine you’ll get any more trouble from that lot. But I’ll hold on to the guns for a while before I give them back. That okay? You ain’t staying here long, I don’t imagine.”

“Sure,” Nick agreed. “I’ll keep the Derringer, though. As a souvenir.”

“Sounds good. Now tell me about this runaway of yours.”

Nick handed over the guns and Lily’s picture and laid out what he knew. The sheriff nodded.

“Sure, I seen her. Least, I think I did. Blue pullover, jeans, carrying a red knapsack, right? I didn’t get a real close look, but there was a little blondie like this with a red knapsack on her shoulder, down at the old service station by the tracks just south of town. Maybe three, four o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

“What was she doing?”

“Nothing. Sitting on a fence, kicking her feet and looking down the road. Like she was waiting for someone. No one living there right now, but it didn’t look like she was getting into anything so I left her alone. ”

Nick tipped his hat back and scratched his head. “Where does the road go?”

“Nowhere really. Hooks around the hill heading south a bit, then peters out into trails and eventually runs into the old Concorde Turnpike leading into Boston. But it’s all wild country nowadays until you get down to the Turnpike. Closer in there’s the remains of a school up top of the hill, opposite of where the fort is now. Lots of ghouls back in the day. Minutemen finally cleaned ‘em out a few years ago, but people still avoid it out of habit.”

“Huh.” Nick got out his map and had her show him, marking the trails in before re-folding it and putting it back in his pocket. Just then there was a knock on the door and the doctor entered.

“What do you figure, Doc?” Mother Kelly asked, pouring out a glass of whiskey and sliding it across the desk.

“Malnutrition, mostly,” the doctor said, pulling up a chair and raising the proffered glass. She took a healthy swallow and grimaced, then held it out for a re-fill. “I’d say by the look of her she’s been sleeping rough and living off whatever she could scavenge. Maybe a couple of weeks. Maybe more. No real injuries, just a lot of cuts and bruises, and her feet are a mess from going without shoes. No outward sign of radiation, but you never know. You’re out in the wild, drinking stream water, you’re definitely going to pick up some rads. Anyway, I treated her for radiation sickness and shot her full of vitamins, just to be on the safe side. Physically, what she really needs is a few days sleep and some regular meals.”

“What about the rest of her?”

“Mentally, you mean?” The doctor shook her head. “Pretty bad, I think. I couldn’t get a lot out of her. Sounds like raiders hit the place. She and her father were outside, everybody else was inside. She ran and hid.”

“Then what?”

“Made her way here, I guess. I didn’t press her for details.”

“What are we going to do with her?” the sheriff asked. “I don’t have a place to put her up. Maybe in one of the cells, I suppose, and just leave the door open.” He looked at Mother Kelly.

“Don’t be daft,” the old ghoul snapped. “She’ll stay here, of course. I’ve got a spare room and the girls will love to have someone to take care of.”

The sheriff looked relieved. “Good. Any expenses, send the bill up the my office. You, too, Doc. The town’ll pay for her board and medical care.”

“Mighty kind of you,” Mother Kelly said. “You’re all welcome to stay. It sounds like things are picking up out there, and Clara should be setting up the buffet soon.” The sound of voices and laughter could be heard faintly through the door, coming down the hallway from the front parlour. Someone was playing the piano and there was singing. But both the sheriff and the doctor demurred, pleading other commitments, the sheriff promising Nick she’d keep an eye out for Lily. Soon it was just Nick and the ghoul.

“What about you?” she said after the others were gone.

“Girl told the sheriff she was from a place called ‘Sawyers’. Does that mean Sawyer’s Crossing, the town that was hit a few weeks ago?”

“Probably. It’s the only Sawyer’s I know. What are you thinking?”

“Makes her probably the only survivor of the massacre. She might have seen something important. It’d be worthwhile letting the Minutemen know.”

“Well, I don’t disagree. But if she’s as fragile as the doc says she is, I don’t think handing her off to them is such a good idea right now. They’re good people up at the fort, but they lack finesse. Even when they mean well. Let me see what I can get out of her. Colonel Biggs is a regular customer. I’ll make sure I pass the word. ”

 

-OOO-

 

It was a short walk to the old service station, technically on the south edge of Carlisle Station but far enough out to have a lonely feel to it. The trees here came very close to town, almost to the service station that was Nick’s goal, while above it loomed the hill where he thought he could just make out the ruins of the school the sheriff had talked about, poking out from among the trees at the crown of the hill. Below that, the road curved southwards, rising gently to skirt the hill on its west side. There were farms down there in the valley everywhere else the forest had encroached, reclaiming its ancient dominion.

Someone had built a fence around the service station yard and put in a garden where the parking lot had been. The fence was weather beaten and falling into disrepair, and it didn’t look like the garden had been tended in some time. The little patch of lawn by the front door was matted and overgrown, and a bit of green showed here and there where the first weeds of spring were poking out of the gravel path leading from the gate. The building itself was still in good repair, but clearly vacant, with the windows and doors boarded over.

He drew his revolver and checked the load, then prowled around. There were no obvious prints in the yard and the boards over the windows and doors were all intact. But a blue, woolen thread caught on the top rail of the fence showed where someone had sat. There was a cigarette butt on the ground there. Nick squatted down to examine it. Nothing distinctive, but traces of char and ash still clung to the end, meaning it was still relatively fresh.

Lily didn’t smoke.

He stood up and went back up the road a little distance then worked his way down past the fence toward the forest edge. His senses were on high alert and he kept one eye on the tree line, wishing he’d asked the sheriff to come with him. But nothing happened, and just in among the trees he found a place where the snow had been trodden down next to a fallen log a few feet off the road, nicely hidden behind a tangle of bush but with a good view of the station. There were two more butts there, sticking out of the snow, and in a clear piece of muddy ground, boot prints.

He scoped out a wider area, being careful to leave no trace of himself. But there was no other indication of recent traffic. The road was asphalt, pre-War, in surprisingly good shape for its age. It was broken and potholed in places, and bulges showed where tree roots had spread beneath it. The trees themselves had encroached on it over the years so that it was half its original width, but stumps along the perimeter showed where they’d been cut back to keep the road at least partly clear.

He went over the ground again around where the watcher had sat, then straightened up, thinking.

Someone had waited here, where they could watch the road from hiding. A man, probably, from the size of the print, and a good six feet or so. He’d been here a while, long enough to smoke at least two cigarettes before Lily arrived, and for a time after, watching her. The sheriff said she looked like she was waiting for someone. So it was a rendezvous. But with who? The watcher? And why wait? Why not go meet her right away?

When he did go to here, there must have been some conversation. Enough time for him – or her – to have another cigarette. And then they left. Together? It seemed likely. “I AM HERE” the note had said.

He looked up the road to where it rose, curving to disappear among the trees. He had a couple more hours of daylight, maybe a bit more, before darkness would become a problem. He adjusted his pack and started up the road.

 

-OOO-

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

Nick followed the road for about a mile as it curved around the western flank of the hill that stood above Carlisle Station on the south. To his right, the trees thinned out until they reached the farmland below. Above him a narrow trail wound through the woods up toward the school. There were footprints in the damp earth where the trail met the road: a small, narrow foot in a hiking boot along with a pair of larger prints, twin to the ones he’d found before.

Lily’s, he thought, looking at the smaller print. She had a way of swinging her left foot out when she walked that made for a distinctive wear pattern on the heel of her shoe. If this was all about her and her friend from the bar running off to play “house” for a couple of days, he was going to feel like ten kinds of fool walking in on them. Still, it didn’t make much sense. Why not just rent a damned hotel room? Granted, a place like this would appeal to Lily’s sense of adventure. But even she would have seen how dangerous this was.

“Highland School” the sign said. Nick studied it from the shelter of the trees. It had been a good size: three stories high with a centre block and wings to either side. The roof of the north wing had fallen in and trees grew in the open spaces between the walls. The south wing was in better shape, but the walls were pocked with bullet holes and the end had partly collapsed. From when the Minutemen cleaned out the ghouls, he guessed. The centre block appeared to be intact, with the main floor windows and wide front doors securely boarded up.

There was no sign of movement. The trees here came almost up to the building and he darted across, flattening himself against the wall by the doors and listening for signs that an alarm had been raised. Nothing. Reaching out, he tried the door. The knob turned but the door itself was nailed securely shut. Same with its partner. No one had come in or gone out this way.

He went around the back. A low, cinder block building poked out from the rear of the school. “Service and Deliveries” the sign read. The rusted-out hulk of a truck was parked in front of a large overhead door, the kind that slides up and down on tracks hung from the ceiling. It was closed, but there was a window at about head height.

He waited, watching carefully. Nothing moved. Scanning the upper floors one last time, he slipped out from among the trees, crossing to the front of the parked truck then slipping around the passenger side. The door there hung open and he looked inside. It was empty. He waited, listening, then moved swiftly to the overhead door and peeked in through the window.

It was a loading bay. In the dim light filtering through the window he could see a stack of broken crates jumbled up in a corner next to a rusted pallet jack. There was a loading dock against the far wall with a set of double doors beyond it, and a workbench next to where a short flight of steps led to an open door. Otherwise, it looked empty.

There was a button. “Ring for service”, it said. Instead, he slipped his fingers under the door and heaved. To his surprise it lifted easily, the guide wheels moving soundlessly in their tracks as if freshly oiled. He was a target then and he knew it, standing there silhouetted by the light streaming in behind him. But no shots came. He breathed a sigh of relief.

Now he could see something he hadn’t before. Tracks – men and horses all jumbled together with marks where several bedrolls had been spread out in one corner. And blood. Lots of it, pooling across the floor in front of the workbench.

Nick had seen people bleed out before. Someone had died here.

 

-OOO-

 

“No, Mr. Valentine. Not even for you. I’d help if I could. I’ve got daughters of my own. But there’s been fighting up north and I’ve got refugees pouring in by the truckload. I’m going to need every gun I’ve got, and then some.”

Nick cocked his head. “Same folks as Sawyer’s Crossing?” he asked.

The garrison commander shot him a look. “How do you know about that? No, don’t tell me. Anyway, it’s not. Looks like some of the Green Mountain gangs moving down, pushing the locals in front of them. Which probably means something’s pushing them. Which might be the Sawyer’s people, yes. I’ve got rangers out with orders to take prisoners. If we find any, maybe we’ll get some answers. Until then, your guess is as good as anyone’s.”

There was a knock at the door and an orderly stuck his head in. “Colonel, sir – Mother Kelly sent one of her girls up. There’s a civilian down there, up from DC. Says he’s looking for this character here.” He pointed at Nick. “Won’t say his business, but it sounds like he’s pretty upset.”

The commandant sighed. “Tell them Mr. Valentine is just leaving.” He turned back to Nick. “Unless you can see in the dark, there’s nothing you can do about this until morning. Even then, I can’t release any of my people to help you. The best I can do is let you stock up at the armouries. I’m sorry it can’t be more.”

It was Jack waiting for him in Mother Kelly’s office. He was dressed in Gunner fatigues and harness. A long-barrelled .44 hung at his hip and a weapons bag was propped up in the corner. Mother Kelly met Nick at the door, an alarmed look on her face. The whorehouse was uncharacteristically quiet, its clientele summoned hastily back to the fort by a runner.

“Jesus, Jack,” Nick swore, looking past her. “Are you trying to get yourself killed, rigged out like that?”

“Screw that,” he grunted, getting up to meet him. “No one here’s seen a Gunner in twenty years. Besides, we’re a long way from Quincy.” He gripped Nick’s hand. “Now where the hell’s my daughter?”

“I take it she didn’t come home?”

“She did not.”

“Damn.” He hadn’t really been expecting it, but still. Quickly, he outlined what he knew. “The blood was still sticky in parts, so at a rough guess, maybe two or three days since it happened. The place was clean otherwise. No garbage or food wrappers. I don’t think they wanted anyone to know they were there.”

“What about Lily?”

Nick shook his head. “No sign of her. Nor a body, either. Only this.” He held up a spent shell casing he’d found near the blood pool.

Jack took it, looked it over. “A .38,” he said, giving it back. “So maybe they went in and whoever was there jumped them. Lily gets off a shot, kills one. The others over-power them, tie them to a horse, maybe, and they ride away.” He took a deep breath. “Or someone else had a .38 and that’s Lily’s blood on the floor.”

“Maybe. But I didn’t find any bodies buried nearby.”

“Yeah, but they wouldn’t, would they? Not if they were lying low.” Jack’s expression was unreadable. “Who were they?” he finally said.

“Well, that’s Exhibit B, as we used to say.” Nick took a short piece of wood out of his pocket. He’d taken it off the arm of a desk he found in a second floor classroom during the frantic search he’d made of the building. Someone had waited there, watching out the window. Although the symbol carved into the wood was ancient, the carving itself had been done recently.

“I don’t get it,” Jack said, looking at it. “Some kind of ‘X’ with the ends bent over. What does it mean?”

“It’s called a ‘swastika’,” Nick said. “It’s very old. Old even before the War. Buncha guys who thought they were gonna rule the world. It turned out badly for them in the end, but it was a near thing. Nazis, they used to call them.”

Jack grunted. “Never heard of ‘em. What would they be doing here? And if they were the Sawyer’s Crossing people – “ Nick had told him about the raid – “why would they have taken this Garrick with them? I thought they only kept the women?”

“That’s a good question,” Nick said. “I propose we ask them when we find them.”

Jack’s upper lip twitched. “I propose we do.”

 

-OOO-

Carlisle Station was buzzing. The town was bursting with refugees. A tent city had been erected just east of town and there was noise and confusion everywhere. The sheriff, busy sorting out a dispute involving a pair of hopelessly tangled wagons, gave Nick a harassed nod. The doctor, working at a makeshift field hospital outside the church, saw him and smiled thinly before turning back to the child she was treating.

Whoever they were, they’d been hit hard. Nick saw gaping wounds and shattered limbs, and the empty stares of people still trying to process the catastrophe that had swept over them. The air was filled with the moans of the wounded and the sound of weeping.

The Minuteman commander had been as good as his word, allowing the two men to re-stock from the post’s supplies. Jack’s duffel bag, meanwhile, had disgorged a sniper rifle (“I hit up Antonio on the way out”) and Nick’s combat shotgun, along with extra ammunition and a small crate of fragmentation grenades. And one other thing.

“Huh,” Nick said, handling the small, football-shaped object gingerly. “I forgot I still had one of these.” He put the micro-nuke back into its case. “A little dangerous without a launcher. Still…” he paused, remembering, “…a handy thing to have in a negotiation.” He slipped it into his pack and adjusted his bandoleers of ammunition. He hated carrying this much weight, but he supposed it couldn’t be helped.

He also had Leroy Pratt’s little Derringer strapped to his ankle. It was a beautiful piece, .22 calibre and less than five inches from barrel to tip. A two-shot, with over-under barrels that flipped open to reload. A collector’s item, worth hundreds of caps to the right buyer. He wondered how it ended up with a loser like Pratt.

Night had long since fallen. The moon had risen, but there was no question of taking up the trail until morning. Jack was exhausted in any case. He’d left Jamaica Plain when Annie’s message reached him and ridden directly here, stopping only to pick up his gear and change horses. Nick left him sleeping at Mother Kelly’s and went out to see if the sheriff needed an extra pair of hands.

It was midnight when he got back. The big house was dark, the curtains pulled closed and the door locked. He knocked, then knocked again. Finally it opened a crack and the muzzle of a pipe pistol poked out at him.

“Who’s there?” a woman’s voice asked. Amy, he thought.

“It’s me. Nick Valentine.” There was a pause then the door closed, followed by the sound of a chain being unlatched. The door swung wide.

“Come in,” she said. Her weapon was lowered, but she held it in a way that suggested she knew how to use it. He entered and she closed the door behind him, shooting the bolt and re-setting the chain. One of the other girls stood a few feet down the hallway leading to the back of the house. She, too, was armed.

“Is everything alright?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said, leading him into the parlour where the pair had been playing cards by lantern light. “It’s been very quiet. There was a little commotion earlier but Mother chased them off.”

“And Jack?”

“Slept right through it.”

“Can we get you anything, Mr. Valentine?” the other one said. “Mother’s sleeping, but I know she would want to be woken if you asked.”

“No, that’s fine. What I really need is whiskey and somewhere to power down for a few hours. I’m about done in.”

“You can have my room,” Amy said. “I’ll sleep down here.” She took a fresh bottle from the bar and lit a candle from the lantern, then took him up the darkened stairs to a room on the second floor, one of several leading off a long hallway. It was small, but comfortable, with a double bed and wardrobe, and a small vanity in front of the window next to an ornate, full-length mirror.

He paused, looking around. “Miss -- ”

“Call me Amy.”

“Amy. I don’t need a bed, just somewhere flat and out of the way. I don’t want to put you out.”

She smiled, almost shyly. “No, please,” she said. “I’d be honoured to have you stay here. Mother speaks very highly of you.”

“Well, okay then.”

She set the bottle and glass on the vanity. “If that’s all you need, I’ll be off. I promised Natalie I’d take the first watch with her.”

“Mother Kelly has you standing watches?”

“All night. It’s very exciting.” She giggled, and her eyes sparkled in the light of the candle. She stopped, then looked at him sideways. “I could come up later, if you wanted.”

“No, thanks,” he said. “I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. But I appreciate the offer.”

“Good night, then.”

“Wait -- ” he said. But she was gone. _Mother speaks very highly of you._ He wanted to ask what that meant, exactly. He’d had a certain amount of celebrity – some would call it notoriety – after the fall of the Institute. But that was long ago. Of course, given the right circumstances, ghouls could be practically immortal. But like the mysterious Meredith, he did not recall having met anyone named Maude Kelly.

Nick lay back, closing his eyes and initiating shut down. It was a bit like walking through the house switching off lights on the way to bed. With the last one, darkness enfolded him. And he dreamed.

 

-OOO-

 

There was a young girl sitting in the desk next to him. The air in the room was thick and stifling despite the open window, and a voice droned on endlessly from the front of the class. He ignored the voice and focussed on the girl. She turned toward him. Her eyes were pale blue, serious and thoughtful, her skin pale and smooth like white alabaster. Her dark hair was cut short and held back with a barrette in the shape of a flower. But as he looked, he found he could see other eyes peering out from behind the blue ones: dark eyes, thick-lashed and flashing, in a woman’s face with olive-tanned skin and long hair, black and full, falling down in waves around it. And he remembered how her hair felt beneath his hands, thick and soft, the tips of it brushing back and forth against his skin, and the way her lips tasted and the feel of her body moving above him.

But no… He recoiled. It was Ellie sitting there. Of course it was Ellie. In her new dress and the brand new shoes he’d made her wear that first day of school: the shiny leather ones he’d bought at Fallon’s with the buckle on top, the ones that had mysteriously disappeared on the way home. He’d taken the hint, and she’d gone back to her beloved sneakers.

“You’ll walk me to school again tomorrow, right?” she said anxiously, turning all the way around in her seat to face him. “And wait while I go in? The others won’t make fun of me? Will they?”

He smiled at the memory. “Just be yourself.” That’s what he’d told her, all those years ago. And she had, to the extent of knocking out one of Nelson Latimer’s front teeth after the latter – two years and thirty pounds her senior – made a crack about her “Robot Dad”. Long dead now, Latimer, killed in a drug deal gone wrong, the damned fool.

He pulled himself back from his thoughts and looked into her pale blue eyes. She laughed, but again he saw those other eyes looking out at him: the dark eyes with the thick lashes. He recognized them finally, and his heart sang, like a sensation of returning to a place once loved and then forgotten. And then they were gone and there were others, staring at him from a face made ancient by grief and the passing years, and he remembered the little house by the mill stream and the young bride who had grown old as she watched death take each of her children, one by one. Memory filled him and overflowed and rushed away and was gone and he awoke in the grey dawn with a name he could not recall on his lips.

 

-OOO-

 

The girl from Frolick’s was finally awake and Mother Kelly let them talk to her. The raiders had surprised them, she said, appearing suddenly from out of the trees in the early dawn. She had been milking, her father returning with the emptied pails, when they jumped him. One held his arms while the other stabbed him to death. They hadn’t seen her, and she’d fled out the back door of the barn and into the woods, hiding in a hollow under the roots of an old tree that had been a play fort when she and her sister were little. There she’d waited, shivering in the darkness as the first shouts of alarm drifted up from the town below, followed by gunfire and the sound of explosions. It hadn’t lasted long. By mid-morning, the final mopping-up was over and there was silence.

Then the screaming began. It lasted considerably longer.

She stayed hidden there for five, terror-filled days until hunger and thirst finally forced her out. It had rained on the second day and she survived by licking at the water trickling down along the roots from the tree above. The house was ransacked and empty. Her father’s body still lay in the yard where he’d fallen, food for the crows and wild dogs. Her mother and sister were gone. The scene was the same at the neighbours’ farm, a mile or so away. She didn’t dare approach the town. Blinded by grief and dizzy with hunger, starting at every noise and terrified the raiders would find her, she fled, making her way eventually to Carlisle Station.

She hadn’t gotten much of a look at the attackers. But she recognized the swastika when Nick showed it to her.

“Yes … I saw that,” she said dully. “The one who killed Papa had it on his forehead.” Her voice broke at the memory and she did not resist when Mother Kelly took her into her arms, shooing the two men out of the room.

They made a quick breakfast – coffee and biscuits for Jack and a long swallow of whiskey for Nick – while going over Nick’s map.

“Let’s say these bent cross characters are the ones ultimately responsible for this new crowd of refugees,” Jack said. “As well as the raid on Sawyer’s. If the Green Mountain gangs are pushing south east, that means our bad guys are coming in from farther to the north west. Maybe here.” He indicated a mountainous part of what used to be upstate New York, sandwiched between Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario.”

“Could be,” Nick agreed. “Pretty rough country up that way. Lots of wilderness even before the War, and not much news out of there since. There’s another possibility, though.” He pointed farther north, across the St. Lawrence River, into the old Canadian province of Quebec. “The girl said she couldn’t understand what they were saying. Used to be lots of french-speakers over the border there, before the War. I imagine there still are.”

“Huh. Didn’t we pacify Canada back in the day?”

Nick laughed. “Pacified might not be the right word. More like ‘garrisoned’. Our polite neighbours to the north didn’t turn out to be so polite after all. Mexico was nearly as bad. Didn’t help us against the Chinese that we’d turned all our borders into war zones.”

“Great,” Jack said, folding up the map and handing it back. “We’re being invaded by Canada.”

Nick nodded. “Looks like a possibility.”

Mother Kelly came out onto the porch to see them off.

“You’ve got to warn them up at the fort,” Nick told her. “Tell them the same people who hit Sawyer’s have been watching Carlisle Station. Could be precursor to an attack.”

“I will,” she said. She held his gaze. “You be careful, Nick Valentine. Don’t go getting yourself killed out there.”

“I won’t.”

“I mean it. Come back to me this time.”

A cold shiver ran down his spine and he wanted to ask what she meant. But Jack was waiting and there was no time.

It was a short hike to where Nick had found the riders’ tracks where they cut the main road just past the school. They stopped and Jack scanned the road up and down, then shrugged out of his pack and handed it and his rifle to Nick. He hunkered down to examine the tracks more carefully, then stood up and picked something off a branch, looking at it closely before flicking it away. He disappeared into the trees in the direction the riders had come from. Time passed. Finally he came back.

“Six horses,” he said. “One of them riding double and another led by a rope. Plus I found some blood smear. My guess is that’s your dead guy, tied across a saddle. Or girl.” He pointed south. “They went that way.”

A sense of hopelessness had come over Nick while he waited. “Sheriff said she saw Lily at the service station on Sunday,” he said. “That gives them a two day lead. They could be anywhere by now.”

“Maybe not so bad as that,” Jack answered. He shouldered his pack and picked up his rifle. “It rained here late Sunday night. I asked. That means these tracks were made since then. I’d say more like a day, day and a half. Plus, riding double like that is going to slow them down, especially if they stick to the woods. It’s still a hell of a lead, but it gives us a chance.”

He was talking as they walked. “Assuming they’re heading home, they’ll leave the road as soon as they feel safe and try to loop around. It’s too open here -- ” he pointed down into the valley below them where a stream ran through open farmland, “-- but the woods start up again about a mile farther down. I’ll bet they turn off and hug the treeline until they get past those farms, then start working their way west and north. Mostly west, if they’re smart, given all the hullaballoo around here.”

It was as he’d said. The trail turned suddenly and plunged downhill, looping around to the south of the open fields and staying just under the eaves of the forest. Once past the farms, the trail kept to the woods, avoiding open country and forcing the riders to move slowly. Nor did they seem to have been in any particular hurry. The trail meandered, like a dog nosing along off-leash, turning off to follow this scent or that and frequently stopping altogether as if to investigate something more thoroughly. Hills were a particular favourite, and the trail often led to the top of a promontory and straight back down again.

“They’re mapping,” Jack said at one point. “This is a scouting party. It’s like you said – they’re planning an invasion.”

This area had all been rural before the War, but thickly populated. There were signs of habitation everywhere: traces of ruined buildings swallowed by the returning forest, the destroyed remnants of a village, burned and overgrown, and once a short stretch of open highway running through a stony notch in the hills. On it were the rusted-out remains of automobiles jammed bumper to bumper, caught in flight the day the bombs fell. Skulls, bleached white by the passing years, grinned out at them through the broken windows. Nick looked in at one. A family, he thought: two adults, three children. And a small dog, its tiny bones mingled with the slightly larger ones in the back seat. Even now you could see the marks of the firestorm that had raged through here, trapping them in their cars and roasting them alive. He shuddered.

Nick, who prided himself on his own woodcraft, found himself envying the ease with which Jack kept to the trail, and the near-total silence in which he moved through the dense woods. It was little short of miraculous, in fact, and he commented on it.

Jack shrugged off the compliment. “Tracking a butterfly in flight, that’s a miracle,” he said. “Anyone can follow six horses through a forest if they keep their eyes open.”

They travelled through that whole long day, never stopping, barely speaking. They came across a campsite late in the afternoon at a place where several roads once met. There had been a roadside tavern there next to a service station and a little ice cream stand before the war, Nick remembered. All gone now, destroyed by fire and the ruins almost completely obliterated by time. The raiders had camped in a sheltered hollow. They gave the camp a cursory examination then kept on.

Nightfall found them outside the ruins of Lancaster. They made a cold camp there in the shelter of a fallen tree and were up and moving again with first light.

The second day was much the same as the first. Early afternoon, found them just past the ruins of Leominster. Fire had destroyed parts of it and the forest had grown in on every side, but a pair of church towers still poked out between the trees. The riders had given the town a wide berth, and Jack and Nick, following them, kept a wary lookout for feral ghouls.

Just past the town, the trail turned onto what remained of a wide highway.

“The old New England Interstate,” Nick commented. “Eight lanes of blacktop, all the way from Boston up into New York. Prettiest drive in the country, they used to call it, back before they added all those extra lanes.”

Here, too, the relentless patience of the forest had erased much of man’s handiwork. The trees had long since grown to the edge of the road and begun spreading across it, the forest sending little tendrils of itself out along every crack and in every pothole. What little asphalt could be seen was humped and riven by tree roots, and the road was mostly blanketed by a thick cover of leaves and drifted-in topsoil. Here, too, were cars: the rusted remnants of a population in desperate flight. The roadway was basically just a place where the tree cover was thinner than elsewhere. Travel would be faster here than in the forest proper, but not by much.

The shadows were beginning to lengthen when they came onto the next raider camp, in a sheltered spot at the foot of a hill. There had been houses here once, along a loop of road tucked into a cleft in the hillside. Most were gone, eaten by the forest and obliterated by a long ago mudslide. The riders had camped here in a small clearing concealed by a stand of bush right against the base of the hill.

It was Nick who heard the drone of flies and smelled the faint, but unmistakable odour of decomposition.

“Something’s buried here,” he said, and fear seized his heart.

Two somethings, it turned out, when they uncovered the shalllow grave scooped into the soil a little distance away. The uppermost body had been dead for a few days. He’d been tall in life, blonde-haired to judge by his beard but with his head shaved. He was barefoot and dressed only in light shorts and a t-shirt, more underclothes than clothes, and Nick guessed he’d been stripped of his gear before burial. His shorts were thick with dried blood. Easing them back, Nick could see the wound, just inside the inner thigh, high up near the groin. The bullet had nicked the femoral artery; death would have followed in minutes.

The body underneath was Garrick’s. He’d been bound hand and foot and buried alive.

 

-OOO-


	6. Chapter 6

“You sure it’s him?”

“Absolutely,” Nick said grimly. Garrick’s wrists and ankles hand been bound tightly with wire. In his struggles it had cut deeply into his skin, and his face and body showed signs of a savage beating. His eyes were wide with horror and his open mouth was filled with the dirt he’d breathed in as it was shovelled in on top of him.

“No more than a day,” Nick said, rolling the other man over to get a better look. “We’re catching up.”

“Good,” Jack said. But he turned away and his eyes were dark with worry.

Nick quartered the area, looking for clues. The raiders had built a small fire in the clearing and there were marks of four bedrolls close by. Two more had been spread at the very edge of the clearing and next to them he spied a tuft of blue thread snagged on the bark at the base of a tree.

“Look at this,” he called to Jack, pointing. “And see here?” A chunk of broken concrete poked out of the ground on the other side of the tree. A thin edge of rebar jutted out from it and the otherwise-rusted metal was polished smooth near the end, as if from rubbing. There were strands of rope fibre caught in the concrete and more of the blue woollen thread.

“She was here,” Jack breathed, touching the bark of the tree. “She was alive.”

“And trying to free herself.”

“That’s my girl.” Jack grinned. “Now let’s go get her.”

 

-OOO-

 

The trail continued nearly straight west. Relieved of some of their burden, the riders had been able to move more quickly. But their trail was clearer, too, and Nick and Jack picked up the pace as well. They travelled in silence, saving their energy for the march and eating and drinking on the move.

Nick could feel the strain on his aging body parts. Already he’d had to engage his auxiliary power circuits and his damage control systems were making worried noises about the state of a number of major and minor bodily functions. He was eating as he moved, stripping handfuls of leaves and the remains of last year’s berries and anything else he could reach off the trees and bushes they passed. The little atomic furnace in his belly could handle anything organic, converting it into power for his systems. But it took more juice nowadays to keep him going than it used to, and even with the new plates, his batteries held less and drained faster.

 He fished a half-empty bottle of whiskey out of his pack and drained it. His body gulped hungrily at the sudden surge of energy. He hated getting old. He looked over at Jack; the strain was telling on him, too. His face was flushed and his jacket was wet with sweat, and he was breathing heavily. But he moved steadily, one foot after another. Slowly, bit by bit, the hunters were closing on their quarry.

The raiders were keeping to the road now. A little distance past the camp where they’d found the burials their trail was joined by another set of tracks: a group of six more riders, coming up from the south. The group picked up speed now, moving more confidently although still hampered somewhat by the lamed horse, and the two hunters also pushed hard, halting for the night only when it finally became too dark to see the trail. They were getting closer. But Jack was worried.

“Day after tomorrow if the weather holds,” he guessed, turning an eye skyward. They were sheltering in a tumble-down service station back among the trees just off the highway. The sky was clear and the night had turned cold, so they had risked a small fire. There had been no rain for several days and the dry wood burned clean and smokelessly. But there were clouds on the horizon. “We could get snow out of this,” he said. “That might not be so bad. Rain would be a problem. If you’re right about them, they’ll turn north sooner or later. If we miss where they turn off, we could lose them entirely.”

“We’ll find them,” Nick said, reassuringly. But the thought of Lily spending another night in the hands of the raiders filled him with dread.

“And when what? What’s your plan for when we meet them?”

“We’ll have to think about that,” Nick said. “Ten of them and two of us…I don’t much like the odds.”

“They’re over-confident,” Jack said. “At first they were at least trying to cover their trail. Now look at them – riding along like they own the place. No fear. I think they’re used to being the big dogs on the block. People like that make mistakes.”

“We’re not covering our trail either.”

“Yeah, but no one’s following us.”

“We hope. But I wish we had a troop of Minutemen behind us.”

The ex-Gunner snorted contemptuously. “For what? So they could march in and get my daughter killed? Sorry, Nick,” he added, “I know the General is a friend of yours. And they’ve come a long way since the mob that attacked us at Quincy. But they’re still just a bunch of farmers with hunting rifles. Anyone with a halfway decent military will eat them for dinner.”

“Really?” Nick said with a touch of sarcasm. “As I recall, those ‘farmers with hunting rifles’ beat your Gunners pretty handily at Quincy.”

Jack laughed. “We were in more danger running the training course in basic. All we had to do was give you Quincy and retreat back into the swamps. Once you followed us in we’d have taken you apart.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Jack stared into the fire without answering. Finally he said, “Quincy was our home. We took a vote on it. And the vote was that we were done hiding in swamps.” He sighed. “Stupid, really. The place was a nightmare to defend. I guess we all knew how it was going to end.”

“Then why didn’t you just surrender? Negotiate peace? Mercenaries of all people should be smart enough to recognize what side of the bread has the butter on it.” Nick felt himself getting angry. “Might have saved us all some grief.”

“And if we had, then what? Be the military arm of the Commonwealth? Paid soldiers marching at the command of our masters in DC and Goodneighbour? We were done with that, too.”

There was silence. Nick poked at the fire, watching it flare up in sparks. “Well, I’m sorry,” he said at last. “Sorry it worked out that way. For all of us. The way things are looking, we could use a few more like you right now.”

“Not all of us tattooed our blood types on our foreheads. There’s lots got away in the confusion. Lots still left, too, even after 20 years. They’re like me. They’ve got families, lives, places to call home. We’re Commonwealth now. But if those bent-cross friends of yours come knocking, they’ll find out we’re Gunners, too.” He stood up, reaching for his rifle. “I’ll take first watch.”

 

-OOO-

 

There was a road, narrow and slick with rain, the asphalt gleaming in the light of the motorcycle’s single headlight. Nick hunkered down low over the gas tank, trying to find shelter behind the tiny windscreen from the rain that pelted down. His fingers were numb with cold despite the heavy gauntlets he wore and the rain had soaked through his leather jacket to the skin beneath.

A flash of lightning lit up the countryside, so close he could hear the thunder even over the rush of air in his ears and the howl of the engine. In the light he saw a car pulled over onto the narrow shoulder and sticking partway out into the road. Its hood was raised and a man stood beside it waving frantically. Faces were pressed against the glass: a woman and children, he thought, their features blurred into pale ovals by the rain. He leaned away, swerving to avoid them as he raced past. Urgency ripped at him.

The road was rising steeply, cutting back and forth in a series of steep switchbacks as it left the valley floor below. There’d been an accident here: a vehicle on its roof, its wheels still spinning, another one on its side, and skid marks leading to a smashed guardrail with tire tracks vanishing into the darkness beyond. Headlights splashed at crazy angles through the downpour and across the bodies lying in careless heaps on the pavement, leaking bloody rivers in the rain. He slowed to thread his way through the mess and felt hands reaching for him. A face loomed, mangled and torn, a shard of glass driven deep into one eye, the mouth working in voiceless agony. But there was nothing he could do and he kicked out and saw then man stagger backwards and fall. Then he was past. He wrenched at the throttle and tore away.

He was going too fast, far too fast: for the weather, for the night, for this narrow, back country road twisting through the high hills. But there was no other way. The main highway was full, jammed with people fleeing the cities, and there was no time. He touched his breast where her letter lay folded in its envelope in an inside pocket:

_“It’s crazy here. Everyone’s leaving, trying to find somewhere safe. Is there such a place? Do you remember your friend’s cabin where we stayed that time? It was so beautiful there, just you and me. If the world’s going to end, that’s where I’d like to be.”_

He gripped the throttle and the night raced away on either side.

 

-OOO-

 

Nick’s eyes flew open and he stared wildly around, trying to remember where he was. The fire was burned to ashes. A cold, grey, light filtered in through the broken roof of the ruined service station. Memory came back to him as the dream slipped away and he sat up stiffly, his joints creaking audibly in the damp morning chill.

Jack lay rolled up in his blanket across from him, fast asleep. He opened his eyes as Nick stirred.

“You didn’t wake me up,” Nick said.

“You seemed pretty done in,” Jack answered, rolling out of his bedroll and rubbing his eyes. “I figured you needed the break.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve marched longer on less.” He began stowing his blanket. “We’d better roll.”

Clouds had moved in overnight and the day was cold under a heavy overcast. In the west, dark streaks of rain waved like ragged curtains along the horizon. But for now, the rain stayed away and Jack picked up the riders’ trail easily. They ate breakfast as they walked, threading their way through the trees and gaining steadily.

“Nick?” Jack said. It was mid-morning. They were wading across a shallow brook at the edge of a meadow. Trees hung over the bank on its far side, roots exposed where the stream had undercut them. A tumbled-down shack of fairly recent vintage suggested that people had lived there recently, but there was nothing inside it except a few sticks of broken furniture and the litter of a dozen seasons, and no clue as to who lived there or what had become of them.

The riders’ trail showed clearly where they’d crossed, standing their horses in the stream to drink before scrambling up the bank on the far side then up the steep valley wall to the crest above.

“What?”

“When you shut down at night, are you sleeping? The way people sleep?”

Nick clambered up the bank, using a tree branch to steady himself then reached back a hand to help Jack up.

“Hard to say,” he answered. “I go into a low power mode that gives my systems a chance to recharge, do a little maintenance, that sort of thing.” He thought about it. “I suppose it’s something like sleep. Why?”

“Because you were muttering away last night. I don’t know what about; I couldn’t make it out.”

“Huh.” Nick started up the hillside to the top of the valley. The morning’s dream came back to him: the motorcycle careering through the rainswept darkness, the mangled corpses littering the accident scene at the cliff-edge and the rain puddling the blood on the pavement and taking it away in rivers around his wheels. He shuddered. “I’ve been dreaming,” he finally said. “Visions. Memories.”

“What do you mean?”

Nick gestured at himself. “My memories end on the day the Institute recorded Nick Valentine’s personality onto their machines. They don’t start up again until the day I woke up in this body. But lately I’ve been remembering things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Well that’s the funny part. I think they’re Nick Valentine’s memories. He was here. I don’t mean before the War. That I’d remember. We came up here lots of times in the old days. Good skiing in the winter, hiking trails, that kind of thing. I don’t mean that. I mean afterwards, after the bombs fell.

“So?”

“So there’s no way I should be able to remember any of that that. Those things happened after my memories were recorded. They didn’t happen to me.”

 

-OOO-

 

About midday the road turned northwest. The trees were starting to thin out here, and in the distance, the Green Mountains spread across the horizon. The riders’ trail was pointed directly toward them.

“Not a bad place to hide out,” Nick, said, indicating the spot on his map. The two had stopped to catch their breath and their bearings. “It’s pretty rugged up there, lots of little valleys to camp out in, plenty of forage for the horse and lots of water. Plus you could see anybody coming for miles. If I were planning an invasion, this is where I’d start out from.”

“So what are you thinking?”

Nick pointed to the map. “It depends which way they go,” he said. “If they stick to the main road, they’ll eventually hit the Connecticut River, here. That means they’ll turn north, follow the valley. It’s wide and flat, open country. Good place for men on horseback. Once they get across the river they can make a beeline for the mountains.”

Jack traced the route with his finger He was shaking his head. “Nick, I don’t think we can catch them. Not with the country opening up here, and not this close to those hills. If you’re right and that’s where they’re headed, we only have a day, maybe less, before they close the door on us.”

“I know. So instead we’re gonna cut the angle, head ‘em off at the pass. Here.”

He pointed to a high valley running north from the highway. A thin, grey line showed where a narrow road wound through it before turning sharply to climb up to a notch in the hills and drop down into the river valley on the other side. “They stay on the highway, they have to loop a long ways around to the south before hitting the river. We go this way, we should be able to come out ahead of them.”

“But what if we’re wrong? Jack said worriedly. “What if they turn off somewhere else? Or just keep going?” He indicated where the line of the highway crossed the river. “They do that, they could be halfway to California before we catch up to them.”

Nick shook his head. “It’s a chance, I know. But what else do we have? We don’t have to worry about them crossing there, anyway. The bridge has been down for years. It’s a day’s ride north to the nearest ford.”

“What if they brought boats?”

“Then I guess we’re going to California.

 

-OOO-

 

“There they are.”

Nick handed the binoculars to Jack. The riders were still a half mile away, approaching along the highway that followed the edge of the wide, flat valley below the hilltop where the hunters lay concealed in a clump of bushes. In the distance, the water of the Connecticut River sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight, and snow glistened among the trees in the deep folds of the hills opposite.

Jack put the glasses to his eyes and stared through them. They riders were in loose formation: two ragged clumps, one trailing the other. They were bareheaded and bare-armed, some of them shirtless in the sunshine, with their weapons slung over their shoulders or hanging from their saddles. He could see their faces clearly through the glasses. They were big men, bearded and shaven-headed, heavily tattooed, some with the swastika symbol carved into their foreheads. One of them threw something at another, who threw it back. The sound of laughter drifted faintly up to them.

He handed the glasses back. “Nine of them,” he said. “They look pretty relaxed for scouts in enemy territory. I guess they figure they’re home free.”

“Or it’s a set up.”

“That, too.”

Nick scanned the valley up and down and twisted around to look behind him. Except for a hawk riding a thermal high above them, nothing moved. Just below them the little forest road curved around the shoulder of the hill before diving down narrow coulee toward the main road, some 300 yards below.

Jack eased his sniper rifle off his shoulder. He’d wound a strip of burlap around the barrel to keep it from glinting in the sunlight and now he slid it forward, squirming around to get into firing position. He laid a pair of spare magazines out next to him.

“Here’s the plan,” he said in a low voice. “You get down there and wait for my signal. Stay hidden. I’ll aim for the lead group. They’ll be surprised, but that won’t last long. If they’ve got any brains, they’ll figure out where I am pretty quick and charge straight up the hill. Let them go past then take them from behind.”

“Okay.” Nick took another look through the binoculars. “Jack,” he said, “I don’t see Lily.”

“I know.”

“We need one of them alive.”

“I know.”

 

-OOO-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

“Go back to your mama, little girl,” Lily muttered to herself. “Go back to your mama. Your _mama._ ” Her lips twisted into a sneer made of equal parts shame and anger. “You _bastards_.”

Lily sat on the fence in the sunshine by the old service station, replaying the scene at the recruiting station over and over again in her head; hearing again the Minuteman officer’s humiliating dismissal and the snickers from the little group of boys in line behind her.  On the way here, she’d imagined how the scene would play out in a dozen different ways. Outright dismissal hadn’t been one of them, and it left her dumbfounded and speechless.  Now she made up a string of clever responses, the things she should have said, each more crushing than the last and ending with a stunning display of gunmanship that left no doubt in their minds as to her suitability as a recruit.

It was wonderfully satisfying daydream which nonetheless left her completely unsatisfied.

“I’ll show them,” she muttered, kicking at the air as she waited in the sunshine for Garrick to show up. Running into Garrick, the recruit she’d met at the Dugout, had been the one good thing that happened today. Literally ran into, actually, as she stormed around the corner coming out of the recruiting station. He’d been very apologetic as he helped her up off the ground and brushed the mud off her jeans. And equally apologetic about his behaviour at the Dugout that night, which was nice. Plus he’d been wearing a sleeveless shirt and tight jeans that showed off his physique to good effect and tickled her in an interesting way.

More importantly, he told her he’d been transferred to a ranger base for training and offered to take her with him.

“You don’t want to sign up here anyway,” he told her over a beer in a little café down the block. “This is for the regular grunts. You wanna be a doughboy, march in the ranks and spend your enlistment doing garrison duty, sure. But the real action is out over the frontier. Rangers are _la crème de la crème_ of the service; the eyes and the ears. Sure, it’s dangerous. But what isn’t? No guts no glory, that’s what my Pops always says.”

“Was he a Minuteman?”

“Pops? Oh, yeah, sure. He’s retired now, but they call him up still when there’s something big going on.”

“Does he know the General?”

“Does he? Hell, yeah. They go way back. My Pops saved the General’s life lots of times. I can’t talk about it, account of it’s all top secret. But when there’s a job to do, it’s our door the General comes knocking on.”

Lily was impressed in spite of herself, and found herself opening up to Garrick, telling him about her troubles with Nick and her mother, and the growing restlessness inside her.

“I just feel like there has to be something more,” she finished.

“There is!” He leaned across the table and took her hands. “People like you and me, we can’t be tied down to a routine. That’s for the squares and the stay-at-homes. They’re the kind of people folks like us were made to protect.”

“That’s what I think, too.”

“Well, then, why don’t you come with me to the ranger station and sign up there? It’s just out of town a ways. Besides, it’s a nice day for a walk in the woods.” He grinned at her and his eyes sparkled.

“And have them tell me I’m too young and go home to my mother? I don’t think I can go through that twice in the same day.”

“Yeah, but it won’t be that way. They know my Pops there. I’ll put in a good word. Once they get a chance to talk to you, there’s no way they’d turn you down.”

“Really?” She smiled at him. “Do you really think so?”

“I know so. They’d be fools, and the Rangers aren’t fools. Listen – I’ve got some loose ends to clean up. What say I meet you in a couple hours? There’s an old service station at the very south edge of town by the old railway tracks. You can’t miss it.”

 

-OOO-

 

“Face it – he’s not coming. Quit fooling yourself.” Lily stared up the road, back the way she’d come, willing Garrick to suddenly appear. She even closed her eyes, screwing them tightly shut then opening them suddenly. It was a habit she’d acquired as a small child when things weren’t going her way and it was just as effective now.  There’d been some traffic up that way a while before, but none of it had come down to where she maintained her lonely vigil, and none of it was Garrick.

The sun had moved a considerable distance in the sky by now, far enough that it was too late to head back to Concord, which meant dipping into her meagre store of caps to pay for a room for the night. With a sigh she slid off the fence and scooped up her pack.

“Hey, kid.”

Lily turned in surprise, dropping her pack. Garrick stood there next to the fence a little ways beyond her. His arms were crossed across his chest. He grinned crookedly at her.

Lily frowned at him, then screwed her eyes shut , held them closed for a second then opened them again suddenly. He was still there.

“I’ll be damned,” she said. “It finally worked.”

“What worked?” He came to her, scooping up her pack and slinging it over his shoulder.

“Nothing,” she said. She frowned at him again. “Where did you come from?”

He gestured back to where the road disappeared into the woods a short distance beyond the old service station. “Just came down from the ranger station up the hill,” he said. “You were looking the other way; I thought I’d surprise you. Sorry if I startled you.”

“You did but it’s okay. You went up there without me?”

“Sure. I figured I’d better tell them you’re coming. They’re excited to meet you.”

“They almost didn’t. I was about ready to leave. You took your time.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. Everything took longer than I thought it would. You know how it is.” He took a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket and shook two out, offering her one and lighting the other.

She refused. “Those things are bad for you,” she said.

“Life is bad for you,” he answered, leaning against the fence and blowing a smoke ring at the sky. “The secret is to take your fun where you can find it.” He took another drag then crushed it out against the fence post and let it fall to the ground. “Speaking of which,” he added, hooking a thumb back at the service station. “There’s a loose board on one of the windows and an old couch in one of the offices. Ranger station’s still gonna be there in a couple hours…” He raised an eyebrow and smiled lazily, letting his eyes trail down over her figure and stopping to rest on the swell of her breasts under her sweater and the curve of her hip.

Lily laughed. “Oh, you think?” She ran a finger playfully along the line of his jaw. “Maybe that’ll happen, Garrick, if you’re lucky. But it won’t be on some ragged old couch with springs poking into my ass. And it won’t be today, either. You get me to this Ranger station. After that,  maybe you and me can get to know each other a little better, and we’ll see how things go.”

He grinned at her. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

She rolled her eyes, but she laughed, too. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we? Coming?”

 

-OOO-

 

The air was colder in the shadows under the trees. Lily pressed Garrick for information as they climbed the road leading up the hill, but a mood seemed to have fallen over him and he was taciturn to the point of sullenness. After a while, she gave up.

He led her to where the trail turned off toward the old school. She could see the ruins of it poking out from amongst the trees.  It was only a short hike from there to the front of the building, but Garrick stopped some distance away.

“Wait here,” he said. “I gotta get their attention, make sure they don’t decide we’re intruders and pick us off.”

She frowned at him. “I thought you told them we were coming?”

“Just making sure. They’re a trigger happy bunch.” He fished a red-and-black bandanna out of his pocket and tied it around his head. “I’ll be right back.” And he was gone, slipping noiselessly away among the trees. She sighed and hunkered down against a tree to wait. A few minutes later he was back, appearing as if by magic next to her. She started and swore at him in a whisper. He laughed quietly and held out a hand.

“It’s all good,” he said. “C’mon.”

He led her in a wide circle around to the back, staying under cover amid the trees. There was no real trail to follow but the undergrowth was light and they made short work of it. The forest cover thinned out at the rear of the building. Fire had passed through here once, and there were signs of fighting. A dead tree, its limbs shattered by an explosion, stood in a clearing. Just past it lay a pair of ghoul skeletons, still dressed in the tattered rags they had worn in life, their skulls partly shot away. The bones themselves were mostly disarticulated and strewn about. Lily thought some of them looked as if they’d been gnawed on. She shuddered.

When they reached the edge of the wood, Garrick motioned to her to wait. He still wore his bandanna and now he stepped out from the trees into the open. A stretch of potholed asphalt that had once been a parking lot stood between them and the building. The rusted-out remains of a delivery truck stood there on the pavement in front of an overhead door. Garrick took off his bandanna and waved it. A figure stepped out from behind the truck and there was an answering wave before whoever it was stepped back into concealment.

“That’s our signal,” Garrick said, motioning.

“Is all this cloak-and-dagger stuff really necessary?” Lily asked. But he didn’t answer and with a shrug she followed him across the parking lot. The sign on the door read “Service and Deliveries”.  The guard standing behind the truck was big and shirtless. His head was shaved and he had a thick, blonde beard and tattoos running up and down his arms and across his heavily-muscled chest. A short-barrelled rifle leaned against the wall beside him and there was a long, heavy knife in a sheath at his hip.  Lily smiled tentatively at him.

His eyes slid across her and he said something to Garrick in a language she didn’t understand. Garrick answered in the same language, heatedly, Lily thought, and pointed at her. The other man answered, then said something to Lily and made a grabbing motion at his crotch.

Garrick yanked her away, his face flushing with anger. “ _Gaspayzie_ asshole,” he snarled,  but to himself, under his breath. The man heard him though, and laughed, then banged on the door and called out something. There was a pause, then a muffled voice answered from the other side, and Lily could hear the sound of chains rattling. The door slid upward.

Lily’s eyes narrowed and she reached for Garrick’s hand. “Garrick? What’s going on? And what language is he speaking?” She looked behind her. The woods seemed a long way away.

“Nothing,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Remy’s mother dropped him too many times when he was little. Now he thinks he’s funny. They all think they’re funny.”

“If you say so.” But something that felt like small, cold, feet were walking up her spine, and with her free hand she tugged surreptitiously at the pistol on her hip to make sure it was loose in its holster.

It was dark inside after the bright sunlight, and Lily blinked while her eyes adjusted to the gloom. They were in a large, high-ceilinged room; a service garage, with a workbench against the back wall next to where a loading dock opened onto a set of closed double doors. Against one wall, a short flight of concrete stairs lead up to a door. Windows flanked it looking down into the garage.

Whatever it had been before, it was a camp now. There were bedrolls on the floor in the corner under the stairs and a small cook stove nearby. Saddles, packs and other gear were stacked neatly off to one side, next to where a group of horses were tied up. They stamped their hooves, whickering and rolling their eyes nervously at the sudden light from outside. A man stood among them, bent over and bracing a horse’s hoof against his leg while he carefully hammered new nails into a loose shoe. He was smaller and slightly built, with a dishevelled mass of long, dark hair and a wisp of a beard on his chin. He carried a knife on on each hip, and he waved cheerfully at Garrick with his hammer,  then frowned as he noticed Lily.

Another man, bigger and blonde like the first, stood by the door holding onto the chain that raised it. He, too, had a knife at his hip along with a holstered pipe pistol. He jerked his thumb at the stairs.

“They’re up there,” he said in heavily-accented Engish, and pointed up the stairs at the door. “And you’d better have a good reason for this. We’re almost ready to move out.”

“I don’t need to explain myself to you, Edouard,” Garrick said.

“You’re right. It’s Rejean who’s asking. Now go.”

“What’s going on?” Lily demanded as Garrick started up the stairs. She pulled her hand out his grasp. “Who’s Rejean? And where are they going? I thought you said this was a ranger camp. These  don’t look like any Minutemen I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s not a camp. Look, Lily. I… I might have mislead you a little. This is just a rest stop, I guess you’d call it. The main camp’s a few days travel away. I figured if I told you that in the first place, you wouldn’t come. You still don’t have to. Rejean is the leader here; these are his men. We’ll meet him and then you can decide what you want to do. Okay? And if you don’t like it, you can just leave. I promise. I’ll escort you back to  Diamond City myself.” 

“Garrick, this is starting to sound like bullshit to me.”

“It’s not. Trust me. Do you trust me?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Well you’d better. And look – “ he reached out his hand. “Give me your gun. They’re nervous about that sort of thing here.”

“My what?”

“Your gun.” He snapped his fingers impatiently. “You can’t just walk in there carrying a gun. Don’t be a such a kid.”

She shook her head. “Now I know this is bullshit. No Minuteman would ever ask for my gun.” She stepped back and looked over her shoulder. Edouard was still standing by the open door, but his fingers were curled around the butt of his holstered revolver, and Remy had come up beside him, his rifle cradled loosely in his arms. The man shoeing the horse had set down his hammer and was slipping a short-barrelled carbine from a saddle-holster.

Lily drew her gun and aimed it at the bridge of Garrick’s nose. “I think you’d better tell your friends to put their guns down,” she said quietly.

“Lily, don’t get crazy.”

She thumbed back the hammer. “I mean it, Garrick. It would be a shame to get brains all over that pretty hair.”

“Easy, Lily,” Garrick said, raising his hands. “These are friends. We’re safe here.” He called out something to the men in the room below, then again in a more urgent tone of voice. There was a long pause, then they reluctantly put their weapons down, including Edouard, who drew his pistol with a two-fingered grip and placed it carefully on the floor at his feet.

“That’s good. Now tell them to move away from the door,” Lily said. “I want them where I can see them.” She jerked her head toward the work bench. She’d turned a little sideways to keep all of them in view.  “And tell them in English.”

Garrick complied and the three men shuffled over to where Lily had indicated. But they were grinning as they moved.

“I don’t know what your game is or who these folks are, “ she said, “but you and me are going to walk out of here, and no one is going to follow us or else the first person who dies is you. Is that understood? And just in case you don’t think I’m serious…” She switched her aim quickly and fired, and a bottle on the workbench next to Remy disappeared in a spray of glass. The grins disappeared.

“Now,” she continued as they backed out the door. “I see six horses and four people. Where are the other two?”

“Behind you,” a voice said, and an arm wrapped around her in a chokehold while another grabbed her gun arm. But she dropped suddenly, slithering out of the hold and twisting around. The man behind her was older, grey-eyed and clean shaven, his skin made leathery by the sun and his hair greying slightly at the temples. She brought her knee up  hard, and with a grunt of pain he staggered backwards, releasing her gun hand. There was movement behind her and she spun around to see Garrick reaching for her. She fired at him point blank, but as she did the newcomer hauled down her gun hand and the shot went wild, ricocheting off the concrete floor. There was a scream from across the room.

“Bitch!” It was Edouard, holding his thigh and staring down in genuine surprise. “The _maudit_ bitch!” he said incredulously. “She _shot_ me!”  He collapsed, and Lily fought to bring her arm up for another shot. But  heavy hands slammed her head against the concrete wall. The world swam around her, then a fist drove into her jaw and her legs buckled. She sagged, and hands wrenched her gun from her fingers. Then a boot took her in the belly and another fist hammered into the side of her head, and she went down.

 

-OOO-

 

There was shouting and a sound like bells in the distance ringing over and over again, and a panicked voice, speaking in a language she suddenly realized she understood. “ _Arrêtes de saigner !_ _Arretes!_ ” The accent was strange and hard to follow, but it was still French, and she hadn’t been Mme. Curie’s best student for nothing, all those years. “Stop the bleeding!  Stop it!” But it wouldn’t  stop, and through bleary eyes Lily could see a scarlet pool bubbling out across the concrete floor from where the stricken man lay, until finally his mouth sagged open and he was still, his dead eyes staring accusingly across the floor at her.

 

-OOO-


End file.
